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Abstract
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Over the last five years, with the Backpage takedown, the passage of the federal Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (FOSTA), and the rise of cryptocurrency, the landscape for investigating and prosecuting sex trafficking offenses has changed dramatically. But these investigations are more necessary now than perhaps ever before. Sex trafficking remains prevalent. In 2019, Polaris reported that the U.S. National Human Trafficking hotline received 11,500 reports of human trafficking involving 22,326 survivors, over 14,000 of whom were survivors of sex trafficking. And the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) noted that one in six of the 26,300 runaways reported in 2019 were likely victims of sex trafficking, a higher percentage than that of 2018.
Sex trafficking of minors and adults is a worldwide problem. Though the extent of sex trafficking is hard to quantify, there is no doubt that it affects both foreign and American victims alike. A primary motivation for traffickers is the profit generated from exploiting others. According to the International Labor Organization (ILO) and the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), human trafficking networks generate over $150 billion in profits around the world. In 2010, sex traffickers generated more profits than Walmart and Exxon Mobil combined--the top two Fortune 500 companies that year.
The federal government, all states, and the District of Columbia have criminalized human trafficking. The Trafficking Victims Protection Act (TVPA) of 2000 is the landmark federal law and the foundation of the federal response to sex trafficking. It created the specific sex trafficking offenses now codified in 18 U.S.C. ยง 1591. Over the years, the sex trafficking statutes have been amended several times in an attempt to address three identified gaps: (1) prosecuting customers or Johns; (2) remedies for victims; and (3) tackling the online advertisement of commercial sex. For example, the Justice for Victims of Trafficking Act of 2015 (JVTA) added the verbs patronizes and solicits to the sex trafficking statute to facilitate the prosecution of customers. The act also clarified that the government does not have to prove a defendant knew or recklessly disregarded that a victim was a minor if the defendant had a reasonable opportunity to observe the victim, a valuable tool against both customers and traffickers who often deny knowledge of their teenaged victims' ages. The law also imposed a $5,000 special assessment for human trafficking offenses to generate revenue to provide services to victims.
The legal framework up until 2015 did not specifically address the online advertisement of prostitution and sex trafficking, though existing statutes had been used to target that conduct. The JVTA took the first step at specifically addressing this problem by adding the verb advertises to the modes of committing an offense under section 1591 when the defendant knew the victim being advertised was a minor or that force, fraud, or coercion would be used.11 This aspect of the statute has been used primarily to prosecute traffickers and their accomplices who post online commercial sex advertisements--rather than websites that host those advertisements.
Keywords: Human trafficking; Violence; Internet crime
Language: en |