2016 Fall Symposium: “Combatting Human Trafficking: Current Trends and Cutting Edge Issues”

Friday, October 28, 2016

8:45 a.m. to 4:15 p.m.
with a reception to follow

Wake Forest University School of Law, Room 1312

CLE Credits: 5.50 General Hours Approved

This event is free and open to the public.

Registration is now Closed.
Thank you to all who attended and/or participated.

Parking

A campus map showing the law school can be found here. A map of Bridger Field and the designated parking area can be found here.

The Worrell Professional Center is located on the east side of campus. A designated parking area for the event has been set up at Bridger Field. Law Review members will be on hand in the morning to help guide traffic and point you in the right direction.

There will be signs that direct you to the designated parking area for the symposium.

We will have shuttles running continuously from Bridger Field to Worrell Professional Center, from 7:45am to 5:00pm. We ask that you please plan to arrive a little early, as it is homecoming weekend on campus and it is possible that there will be traffic.

Please direct any questions to Kyleigh Feehs at [email protected].

Description

Human trafficking mandates a comprehensive approach for eradication, as no one sector has the capability to prevent trafficking, protect victims, and prosecute traffickers. All are invited to attend the Symposium on Combatting Human Trafficking and to learn more about their role in raising awareness, building partnerships, providing information, protecting victims, and bringing criminals to justice.

Considered one of the most rapidly growing criminal industries in the world, human trafficking is an issue that demands increased awareness, thoughtful discussion, and most importantly, meaningful and cogent action. Human trafficking, a form of modern day slavery, is one of the most serious human rights violations of our time. It thrives under the notion that one person’s life, liberty, and fortune can be sold, bought, or used for the profit of another. Current estimates indicate that there are nearly 30 million men, women and children who are being trafficked around the world today, putting roughly $150 billion into the hands of traffickers each year. It is not just a foreign crime, but also one that runs rampant within the borders of our own country. While every state criminalizes human trafficking to some extent, lawmakers must continue to develop new methods to punish traffickers and provide support for victims.

The Symposium will explore policies and practices to address human trafficking and critically examine innovative solutions to increase the protection of victims and prosecution of traffickers. Panels comprised of academics and practitioners will discuss how to best protect victims. By addressing how to provide safe harbor for victims and proposing amendments to legislation, including laws regulating prostitution and immigration, the panelists aim to change the legal perception of sex trafficking victims and increase trafficking survivors’ access to rehabilitation services. Presenters will also explore the need to strengthen public justice systems, promote accountability in corporate supply chains, and examine the impact of immigration reform in preventing human trafficking.

In addition to hearing from practitioners and academics, Symposium attendees will have the opportunity to understand the impact of human trafficking through the personal testimony of a trafficking survivor.

Agenda

A Survivor’s Voice: Q&A with Margeaux Gray

Margeaux Gray, a survivor of child abuse and sex trafficking, is an Executive Committee member of the National Survivor Network and Executive Board Member of MENTARI, USA, who uses her past experiences of injustice to bring justice to others. Today, she advocates against all forms of abuse by mentoring at-risk youth, speaking to the public, and consulting with various organizations and providers on the improvement of victim services in the healthcare and social service fields. Margeaux also uses her talent as an artist to convey the beauty and value of individuals that are often overlooked in today’s society, among them victims of abuse, human trafficking, and those with disabilities. In 2016, Margeaux was named the Muhammad Ali Center’s 27th “Daughter of Greatness” in recognition of her activism and pursuit of justice. In 2015, she was featured in New York New Abolitionists’ “Who Are They” portrait exhibition and book, which highlights 21st century abolitionists, women, and men committed to ending human trafficking. Margeaux is a member of the Louisville, Kentucky Human Trafficking Task Force, the PATH Coalition of Kentucky and an Advisory Board Member for TO THE MARKET and JUSTICE AT LAST. See MargeauxGray.com for more information.

Abstracts

Fighting Human Trafficking Today: Moral Panics, Zombie Data, and the Seduction of Rescue
Denise Brennan

While trafficking seems to be well known, what exactly do we know? What images and statistics get circulated? A particular set of truth claims dominates public discourse and policy on trafficking — some of which require magical thinking. Claims about thousands of women trafficked to the Super Bowl are a breathtaking example of panics supplanting facts. This talk tackles examples of what I call “zombie data” — data that defy logic and just won’t die! — and nonetheless get repeated over and over. While unpacking wild claims about trafficking, this talk points to ways to join the fight for migrant justice — essential to preventing trafficking. It draws from nearly ten years of research for a book which follows the lives of the first trafficking survivors in the United States, Life Interrupted: Trafficking into Forced Labor in the United States. The book situates trafficking on one end of a continuum of everyday forms of abuse of migrant workers. The focus on the most extreme cases of exploitation — trafficking — overlooks the normalization of migrant abuse across low-wage sectors as “part of doing business.” Trafficking may not be all around us, but exploitation in labor sectors like agriculture and domestic work is.

At the same time, a host of antiprostitution policies (passed off as antitrafficking efforts) have thwarted, contradicted, and undone the effectiveness of anti-trafficking efforts. Antiprostitution activists have stretched antitrafficking campaigns far beyond the goal of ending forced sexual labor. “Fighting trafficking,” instead, has become an excuse to eliminate all forms of commercial sexual transactions. So-called “end demand” policies have not reduced commercial sexual transactions but rather have driven them further underground. The “rescue” of sex workers, both U.S. citizens and foreign nationals, who choose to work in the sex trade, has resulted in their incarceration and deportation. I call these “coercive rescues” since sex workers have pointed out that their labor conditions weren’t coercive but attempts to force them out of the sex trade were. Rescues have a seductive power. Less sexy, perhaps, is the fight to protect the rights of all workers—including undocumented migrants and those working in the sex sector.

Meeting the Legal Needs of Human Trafficking Survivors
Sarah Byrne

Increased awareness among law enforcement, the courts, schools, and the public about human trafficking, and the identity of its perpetrators and victims, has caused a surge in human services needs across the country.  Survivors of human trafficking need healthcare, counseling, housing, and support/empowerment programming, but they also need lawyers. Unlike victims of most other crimes, trafficking survivors have their own legal needs due to their experience of being trafficked; yet they are not always entitled to a court-appointed attorney or eligible for legal aid. Without legal representation, survivors of trafficking can be left to wade through the rocky waters of justice alone, un-empowered, and misunderstood; an experience not too dissimilar from being trafficked.

This article will: (1) identify the various legal needs of trafficking survivors; (2) address the unique challenges facing the lawyers who represent them; (3) argue for the self-directed representation of minor survivors; and (4) provide guidance for lawyers and law firms called to meet the legal needs of those who have endured such a horrific reality.

Attacking Human Trafficking through Legislative Change
Judge Joseph A. Colquitt

This presentation addresses the need to attack human trafficking through effective, comprehensive legislation. It primarily focuses on Uniform Law Commission’s Act on Prevention of and Remedies for Human Trafficking.

For 125 years, the Uniform Law Commission has provided the states with non-partisan, well-drafted and vetted uniform acts. ULC Commissioners are appointed by their respective states. All must be attorneys licensed to practice law although they may be practicing lawyers, judges, law professors, legislators, or legislative staff. The Commissioners, with the assistance of Reporters appointed for particular projects, draft, approve and promote the enactment of uniform state laws.

In 2010, the American Bar Association and other organizations asked the Uniform Law Commission to explore the need for a uniform act on human trafficking. Although all states had some laws that addressed or could be used to address human trafficking, the ULC study of the question determined that a uniform act would better address the challenges presented by human trafficking. After two years of drafting a proposed uniform act, the Uniform Law Commission overwhelmingly approved the Uniform Act on Prevention and Remedies for Human Trafficking [the Act]. Shortly thereafter, the American Bar Association Board of Delegates meeting in San Francisco, California, unanimously endorsed the Act. To date, seven states have enacted the Act and three additional states are considering the Act in their legislative sessions.

The Act is a package of criminal, civil, and procedural provisions focusing on human trafficking. The Act offers to the states a collection of uniform and comprehensive criminal offenses. It also creates protections, services and remedies for human trafficking victims. The five criminal offenses created and defined are trafficking of an individual, forced labor, sexual servitude, patronizing a victim of sexual servitude, and patronizing a minor for commercial sexual activity. Protections and remedies for victims include immunity for minors, confidentiality, an affirmative defense, expungement of a conviction, and the right to a civil action against the human trafficker.

Time will not permit a review of all the many aspects of the Act. Therefore, the presentation will focus primarily on some of the more significant provisions such as the expanded definition of coercion, the inclusion of debt bondage, business entity liability, minor-victim immunity, an affirmative defense for victims, expungement of convictions for victims, and eligibility for benefits and services.

Preventing Forced Labor in Corporate Supply Chains: The Coalition of Immokalee Workers’ Fair Food Program
Steve Hitov

The Coalition of Immokalee Workers is a human rights organization composed entirely of farm workers, most of whom work part of the year in Florida’s $650 million tomato industry. In 2011, CIW initiated the Fair Food Program, the first manifestation of its Worker-driven Social Responsibility model for ridding corporate supply chains of human rights violations. In the six short years since its inception, the Fair Food Program has ended the scourge of forced labor in the East Coast tomato industry, using an approach that the United Nations Working Group on Business and Human Rights has praised for its “smart mix” of monitoring tools and enforcement strategies and its potential for tackling human trafficking throughout the world.

We examine the Fair Food Program’s uniquely successful enforcement mechanisms later in this article, but to appreciate fully the magnitude of the Program’s accomplishment in eliminating forced labor in the fields, one must first understand the extent to which modern-day slavery in American agriculture represents a continuum from the days of chattel slavery. While the phenomenon of forced labor has taken many forms over the past four centuries, the industry has never been entirely free from its clutches. Florida’s history is instructive on this point.

Decriminalized Prostitution: Impunity for Violence and Exploitation
Donna Hughes

For 29 years (1980 to 2009) prostitution was decriminalized in Rhode Island. Lack of laws or regulations created a permissive legal, economic and cultural environment for the growth of sex businesses. During this time, sexual exploitation and violence against women and girls were integrated into the economic development of urban areas. The number of sex businesses grew rapidly during this time period. Organized crime groups operated brothels and extorted money from adult entertainment businesses. Rhode Island became a destination for pimps, traffickers, and other violent criminals. The lack of laws impeded police from investigating serious crimes.

In Defense of Backpage
Alexandra Levy

Backpage has long been a pet enemy of many anti-trafficking advocates. The fact that the website connects trafficking victims with clients makes it, at first glance, an understandable target. However, a closer and more rigorous inspection reveals that the war on Backpage is based on a misunderstanding of its relationship to human trafficking. There is neither empirical support for the assumption that Backpage causes trafficking, nor any evidence that shuttering Backpage would reduce it. But what is perhaps most telling is that Backpage’s detractors appear indifferent to whether their strategy is effective, preferring instead to focus on the theater of their crusade.

Like many aspects of the fight against human trafficking, condemnation of a public forum echoes the past: a century ago, the “Disreputable Dance Hall” was first on the list of “Economic Causes for White Slavery” enumerated in a 448-page treatise entitled “Horrors of the White Slave Trade: The Mighty Crusade to Protect the Purity of our Homes.” (Others around the same time described the dance hall as “the training-ship of prostitution,” “the ante-room to hell,” a “portal” into the “White Slaver’s mart,” and “a canker.”) The unstated assumption, of course, was that the dance hall was the cause of “disorder and open indecency” – not to mention white slavery, divorce, and the tango – and that, by extension, these ills could be comprehensively eliminated by shuttering it.

Exploitation, divorce, and dancing long predated the advent of the dance hall, just as sex trafficking, under current laws, exists apart from Backpage. But the war on Backpage is more than just a distraction: to the extent that Backpage expands customers’ access to victims, it likewise increases victims’ exposure to law enforcement – which, in theory, improves their chances of being recovered. All eliminating Backpage would do is reduce the visibility of trafficking. This is both appealing (because visibility is easily mistaken for incidence) and counterproductive (because visibility increases chances of recovery). But confusing a problem’s disappearance with its resolution is doubly dangerous where, as here, visibility actually contributes to the solution. Indeed, the greatest casualties in the war on Backpage may well be trafficking victims.

Criminalizing Buyers Under Child Sex Trafficking Laws As a Critical Protection for Child Victims
Christine Raino

Over the past 5 years, Shared Hope International’s legal analysis of state laws under the Protected Innocence Challenge has shown that certain approaches to the criminalization of child sex trafficking are undermining efforts to develop protections for the victims these laws seek to protect. What these approaches have in common is that they fail to identify all commercially sexually exploited children as victims of sex trafficking. State trafficking laws that narrow the definition of child sex trafficking to exclude certain offenders, create not only an offender hierarchy, but also create a hierarchy of victims—those victims who will receive protections developed for child sex trafficking victims and those who will not be entitled to the same protections because they fall outside their state’s definition of a child sex trafficking victim.

So why do states retain these distinctions? Why create victim hierarchies? The problem seems to stem from stereotypes about child sex trafficking victims that persist in our contemporary discussion, despite increased understanding that the reality of sex trafficking is much more diverse and complex than these stereotypes reflect. For example, while the force, fraud or coercion narrative has been consistently eliminated from state sex trafficking laws, with only 3 states retaining this requirement for all minors and 2 states partially retaining it, the idea that some children are choosing commercial sexual exploitation persists. As long as that concept is retained culturally, laws will continue to develop with that narrative in mind and we will create victim hierarchies that provide greater protections for the stereotypical victim seeking rescue and minimize the need to protect the more typical victims – those who are not knocking on the door seeking help and may even reject help when it is offered, but who have endured tremendous trauma and are operating under the effects of that trauma.

An even more pervasive stereotype is that a child sex trafficking victim must have a trafficker. This perception of third party control being fundamental to the crime of child sex trafficking also stems from the stereotype that a buyer is inherently less culpable than a trafficker—that buyers do not victimize children to the same degree as traffickers. However in reality, there are many different kinds of buyers just as there are many different kinds of traffickers. Some traffickers are not violent, some buyers are extremely violent. This continuum of severity is incorporated in the law with regard to traffickers, but culturally there remains quite a bit of reticence to address the continuum of culpability with regard to buyers.

This paper will examine the harmful impact of failing to define the crime of sex trafficking to include all commercially sexually exploited children, with specific focus on how the failure to recognize the conduct of buyers of sex with children as a crime of sex trafficking excludes some of the most vulnerable victims, and how as states start to do the hard work of developing protective responses for child sex trafficking victims, it is critical to ensure that all commercially sexually exploited children will be afforded these critical protections.

2016 Federal Human Trafficking Law Update: An Analysis & Recommendations from the Year’s Legal Developments
John Cotton Richmond

This year has produced remarkable developments in human trafficking law through the federal appellate courts. Building on four rounds of amendments to the Trafficking Victims Protection Acts (TVPA) since its original passage in 2000 and prior judicial decisions, the recent federal human trafficking cases have generated significant advances in how the law stops traffickers from exploiting victims and what kinds of relief and protection are available to survivors.

These cases deal with a wide range of issues including, extra-territorial jurisdiction, victim restitution, evidentiary issues, civil liability for advertisers, the prosecution of customers for sex trafficking, sentencing, and the application of strict liability for the sex trafficking of minors. This paper will explore the 2015 TVPA amendments and the recent published federal human trafficking opinions in the context of existing law and provide recommendations and analysis regarding future developments in human trafficking law.

Beyond Safe Harbor: Confronting Prosecution Dilemmas in a Post-Safe Harbor Act State
Lindsey Roberson

Safe Harbor laws have been enacted in almost every state in the union over the last several years, North Carolina included. These laws strengthen penalties for offenders and also work to increase victim identification by immunizing minors from prosecution for prostitution. The results have led to a growing awareness of the crime of trafficking in local jurisdictions, as well as higher levels of prosecutions in human trafficking and related offenses. Safe Harbor laws have also helped to shift the paradigm away from prostitution as the main focus of prosecution in this sphere, and toward identification and investigation of facilitators and others driving demand for commercial sex. Nevertheless, as state prosecutors and law enforcement officers obtain better legislative tools for investigation, charging and prosecuting offenders, many still face challenges in victim identification and appropriate charging decisions as they wade into increasingly unchartered territories. This note will explore three of these hurdles.

First, many prosecutors find themselves facing the dilemma of prosecuting the girl (or possibly, boy) known as the “bottom.” The bottom is defined by those in the life as the girl who has “been in the longest,” “the bottom bitch,” or more charitably, “the girlfriend.” Although Safe Harbor –in most states – eliminates the possibility of minors being charged with prostitution, it does not, however, immunize those underage from being prosecuted as facilitators, and no state provides immunization for bottoms over the age of 18. Thus, law enforcement and prosecutors often find themselves forced to cover uncomfortable terrain when faced with the dilemma of whether to prosecute these individuals, who are almost definitely previous – and most likely current – victims of human trafficking and commercial exploitation themselves. This unique challenge can be mitigated by additional legislative changes, but will be better confronted with increased training for law enforcement and prosecutors on how to identify true power differentials between individuals ensnared in exploitation.

Second, across the country there are increasing cases, both in state and federal courts, regarding the use of drugs as coercion exerted over victims by traffickers. In some instances this may manifest as young victims who are introduced to illegal or controlled substances by pimps or traffickers as a way of gaining trust and befriending soon-to- be victims. For others, it is the exploitation of an existing addiction as a way of controlling victims’ by withholding drugs and threatening withdrawal if victims do not perform as pimps or traffickers require. Although good case law is being made in several circuits (see e.g. both the 6th and 8th Circuits) regarding the recognition of this tactic as a “severe form of harm” under federal legislation, the progress is much slower in state courts where Safe Harbor is generally a much more recent concept and where most states do not specifically define this type of coercion by current statute.

Finally, although many states have increased penalties for offenders of trafficking and pimping, including North Carolina, the sentences facing those offenders in state court often pale in comparison to the comparable federal sentences. Likewise, the sentences facing the buyers of sex—both of adults and minor victims of exploitation—requires increase under state laws in order to continue to encourage the shift away from prosecution of the lower level crime of prostitution, and onto a higher-level focus that will confront demand and facilitation. As prosecutions in these areas increase, so too will the penalties for the offenses, but until then, collaboration with federal partners, creative charging decisions for offenders, and more specialized prosecutors in state and local jurisdictions will enhance the quality of justice surrounding these offenses and encourage better cooperation from victims.

Facebook

Twitter

Linkedin

email

Print