Human Trafficking and Prison Labor

There are many things the anti trafficking community does not agree on, and some very deep and very real divisions that make it hard to work together at times. We believe there are also real opportunities to work together toward things that will meaningfully improve people’s lives.

This January, Human Trafficking Awareness Month, Polaris and United Way are reflecting on compounding issues that are impacting human trafficking.

October 28th marks 20 years since the first Trafficking Victims Protection Act (TVPA) was signed into law establishing the crime of human trafficking in the United States and forming the baseline for where the movement head.

Survivor Cheri Crider describes her story of resilience. She emphasizes that people need to better understand the complexities of how trafficking works and how certain systems exacerbate the crime.

Not all the missing children recovered in recent high profile U.S. Marshals operations were victims of human trafficking. But what we know about those operations reconfirms what we know about how sex trafficking happens in the vast majority of situations.

When most people think about child sex trafficking they think of stories involving kidnapping, windowless vans, and chains. However, focusing on these rarer examples may cause us to miss out on the realities of how trafficking typically happens.

Technology plays a role in almost every aspect of human trafficking. Polaris's Chief Technology Officer explored this issue before the House of Representatives Committee on Science, Space, and Technology.

The U.S. National Human Trafficking Hotline saw a nearly 20 percent increase in victims and survivors directly reaching out for support. This indicates a significant development for both the Trafficking Hotline and the anti-trafficking field as a whole.

The pandemic is greatly impacting Latinos and Black people in the United States as the result of systemic inequities in our society. Those inequities are the same ones that create the vulnerabilities that traffickers often take advantage of.

The Wayfair theory, like other viral stories, can potentially result in overwhelming services meant for victims, as well as increasing online harassment and privacy intrusions of people mistakenly believed to be victims. These theories also detract from the knowledge we do have about how sex trafficking actually works, and how we can prevent it.

Georgia enacted a law that allows adult survivors to clear their criminal records of convictions that occurred because they were being trafficked. This is great news for countless human trafficking survivors, the vast majority of whom have some record of arrest or conviction as a direct result of their victimization.

Most people assume that slavery in the United States was abolished in any form but the reality is that the Thirteenth Amendment contained one important exception: Prison labor. Those who have been convicted of a crime can still be forced to work in this country.