Reauthorize the TVPA

Ann Bartow of Feminist Law Professors asks a rhetorical question that... really needs asking. First the setup

Authorities: Kidnapped girl rescued at [New Jersey --fl] motel

ABSECON — Police arrested a Vineland man and three other people after a Massachusetts girl called her mother to report she was being held against her will at a White Horse Pike motel.

The mother notified Absecon police, who responded late Tuesday night to the Super Lodge Motel room where the girl was staying. She told police she had been threatened with a stun gun, forced to stay in various motels for at least a week and forced to work as a prostitute in the Atlantic City area.

Police said the four captors returned to the motel shortly after officers arrived and were arrested.

...

The girl was treated and released from an area hospital and is now home in Massachusetts, according to a statement issued by the Absecon Police Department.

Authorities would[n't] give the exact age of the victim, or when she was first allegedly kidnapped, stating only that she is under 18.

Source: South Jersey News

and now Bartow's question:

Had she been 18 or over would she have been assisted, or arrested? Please, if you have any decency in your soul, support passage of the Trafficking Victims Protection Act.

She asked the question here.

Response #1:

Under the current version of the Trafficking Victims Protection Act the victim would have been assisted rather than arrested even if she was over eighteen. The current TVPA is very clear that its coverage extends to anyone who is subject to "force, fraud or coercion" and the mom's complaint would have been sufficient to invoke the act.

The TVPA, which is up for reauthorization this year, has been subjected to some pretty substantial amendments in the House of Representatives that have pitted various anti-prostitution and anti-trafficking groups against each other with the result that the whole thing has become bogged down in the Senate.

But Bartow is correct that it would be a very big problem if TVPA is allowed to lapse. A very big problem because not only would the haphazardly-added anti-coerced-prostitution provisions go down but so would the *main* provisions of the bill against human trafficking of *all* kinds. The question is which side will blink first.

To echo Bartow, if opponents of reauthorization of the unamended bill had any decency in their souls they'd drop their amendments and let the bill pass.