Ann Bartow of Feminist Law Professors is evidently unhappy about it but here’s some good news: The long-awaited and much-needed “William Wilberforce Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act of 2008” anti-trafficking law has passed both the House and Senate.
Bartow blames Senator and Vice-President-elect Joe Biden for helping pass the law minus the House amendments that had held it up in the Senate and drawn opposition from such notorious human-rights haters as… Human Rights Watch and from international sex-traffick-loving organizations such as… um… anti-sex-trafficking and immigration-rights NGOs. Notorious anti-feminists like Eleanor Smeal, President of… oh wait… Feminist Majority Foundation said of the bill’s passage, “In addition to providing assistance to trafficking victims, this Act further puts the weight of the federal government behind efforts to combat trafficking for labor, sexual exploitation and child labor.”
In all seriousness Bartow’s issue wasn’t with Wilberforce itself, which has always focused on the issues of international trafficking. Instead she and others argued it was with inadequate federal-level legislation covering prostitution and, particularly, pimping. Given the fairly substantial levels of interstate transfers of funds, contacts, and humans engaged in commercial sex more tools for investigating, prosecuting such violations and coordinating multi-state efforts would probably be helpful as most anti-prostitution law enforcement happens at state and local levels.
However the effect of the objected-to amendments to the 2007 version of the Wilberforce act would have clumsily made the State Department a party to such interstate law-enforcement, effectively defined all prostitution as sex-trafficking, prioritized sex-trafficking over all other forms of involuntary servitude, diverted resources away from actual, you know, human slave trading, while relocating actual international sex-trafficking authority under the domestic-trafficking Mann (a.k.a. “white slavery”) Act, (forcing, incidentally, the creation of a new crime called, I believe, either “extreme” or “severe sex trafficking” to handle all the case of actual… international, non-domestic-prostitution sex slavery previously covered in all previous versions of the law.)
The new version merely strengthens and increases funding for the existing law. Disappointing I know. The good news, though, is its passage now creates a clear path for activists for whom the only form of slavery that matters is sex slavery to lobby for federal and state legislation dealing with actual domestic inter- and intrastate trafficking. And as long as they focus on actual conscription and exploitation of involuntary sex workers, and don’t try poaching funding or resources from enforcement of other anti-human-trafficking initiatives they have my blessing.
Meanwhile, though, the small but very real proportion of the international migrant community that winds up in outright slavery, debt peonage, or other forms of conscripted transport and servitude will receive continuing protection under the newly-reauthorized law.
