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Recognizing and Responding to Human Trafficking in Texas: Summary
technically be prostitutes or sex workers because they cannot legally consent to commercial sex) Many victims of human trafficking are forced to engage in sexual practices through threats or other types of coercion, but trafficking also occurs as labor exploitation in urban, suburban, and rural areas. Many victims are lured with false promises of well-paying jobs or manipulated by people they trust. They are forced or coerced into prostitution, domestic servitude, or other types of forced labor (e.g., in agriculture, construction, fisheries, or mining industries). Victims can be found in legitimate and illegitimate labor industries, including sweatshops, massage parlors, agriculture, restaurants, hotels, street peddling, door-to-door sales, begging, and domestic service. Risk factors for being vulnerable to human trafficking include: • Extreme poverty • Minimal education • A history of abuse or family instability • Being disabled • Belonging to a marginalized or stigmatized gender, ethnic, or cultural group Traffickers use various techniques to control their victims and keep them enslaved • Isolation from: family and friends • Control: of the victims' money • Intimidation/threat: use or threat of violence toward victims or their family members The life situations of people who are trafficked are almost always complicated, whether they are under a trafficker’s control, trying to leave, or already out of a trafficking environment. Human trafficking became a federal crime with passage of the Trafficking Victims Protection Act of 2000 (TVPA), which was revised and updated in 2015. The goals of the TVPA were to prevent severe forms of human trafficking, both in the U.S. and overseas; to protect victims and help them rebuild their lives in the U.S.; and to prosecute traffickers and impose federal penalties. Prior to enactment of the TVPA, no comprehensive federal law existed to protect
INTRODUCTION Human trafficking has been called a form of modern-day slavery. It is a crime involving the exploitation of someone for the purpose of compelled labor or a commercial sex act through the use of force, fraud, or coercion. Victims can be women or men, adults or children, citizens or noncitizens, and it occurs across the U.S. and throughout the world. Human trafficking does not require crossing international or state borders. For clinicians and healthcare workers, human trafficking can be viewed as a serious health risk associated with significant physical and psychological harms. The abuses suffered by people who are trafficked include many forms of physical violence and abuse (e.g., beating, burning, rape, confinement) as well as many psychologically damaging tactics such as threats to themselves or their family members, blackmail, extortion, lies about the person’s rights, and confiscation of vital identity documents. DEFINITIONS Human trafficking : “The recruitment, transportation, transfer, harboring or receipt of persons by means of the threat or use of force or other forms of coercion, of abduction, of fraud, of deception, of the abuse of power or of a position of vulnerability or of the giving or receiving of payments or benefits to achieve the consent of a person having control over another person, for the purpose of exploitation” Human smuggling : Involves the provision of a service—typically transportation or fraudulent documents—to an individual who voluntarily seeks illegal entry into a foreign country Sex trafficking : When an adult takes part in the sale of sex through threat, abduction, or other means of coercion Consensual commercial sex : Willing and consensual exchange of money for sex; does not infringe on the human rights of the participants (Baldwin et al., 2011; note that children cannot
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