OPINION:
When I introduced the Trafficking Victims Protection Act (TVPA), more than 20 years ago, the legislation was met with a wall of skepticism and opposition — dismissed by many as a solution in search of a problem. Several members of Congress turned me down when I asked them to cosponsor the bill. For most people at that time — including lawmakers — the term trafficking applied almost exclusively to drugs and weapons, not human beings.
Reports of vulnerable persons — especially women and children — being reduced to commodities for sale were often met with surprise, incredulity or indifference.
My legislation — the Trafficking Victims Protection Act signed into law in 2000, created a new whole-of-government domestic and international strategy and established numerous new programs to protect victims, prosecute traffickers and to the extent possible prevent it in the first place — the three Ps.
The Trafficking Victims Protection Act included a number of “sea change” criminal code reforms including treating as a victim — and not a perpetrator of a crime — anyone exploited by a commercial sex act who had not attained the age of 18 and anyone older where there was an element of force, fraud or coercion.
The TVPA radically reformed the U.S. criminal code to authorize asset confiscation and jail sentences of up to life imprisonment.
Included among the historic reforms:
* Thousands of human traffickers have been prosecuted and jailed pursuant to the Trafficking Victims Protection Act, including all charges brought against Jeffrey Epstein and the infamous convictions involving the “Smallville” actress Allison Mack and another recent case in Monmouth County.
However, believing that federal law needed parallel state and local statues to effectuate an effective prosecution strategy, my law included new Department of Justice programs to assist states in crafting laws and authorized the creation of new anti-human trafficking task forces — today there are 57 task forces throughout the country.
* In like manner, the TVPA provides law reform and best practices technical assistance to other countries. We want the whole world on the same page — with laws, policies and priorities that aggressively attack this insidious evil.
* The act also included sheltering and a national hotline and on the refugee side, created a new asylum category — the T visa — to protect victims and their families. The T visa not only provides asylum for the victim, but for family members as well.
* Then there is Megan’s Law, which protects children domestically. In 2008, I first introduced International Megan’s Law. It passed the House in 2010, 2014, 2016 — and, thankfully, finally cleared the U.S. Senate and was signed into law in 2016 — eights years later!
Megan Kanka, from my hometown of Hamilton, was just 7 years old when she was kidnapped, raped and brutally murdered in 1994. Her assailant lived across the street. Unbeknownst to her family and other residents in the neighborhood, he was a convicted repeat child sex offender.
Megan’s heartbroken-to-this day-parents — Maureen and Richard Kanka — have been amazingly effective, courageous and heroic in successfully pushing every state in the union including New Jersey to enact Megan’s Law.
We know from law enforcement, academia and media documentation that Americans on the U.S. sex offender registries are frequently caught sexually abusing children in Asia, Central and South America, Europe and, frankly, everywhere.
Now, under International Megan’s Law, convicted child sex offenders who travel abroad must provide notice to the U.S. government — via the Angel Watch Center — prior to departure of all planned destinations. Failure to do so carries a significant jail term commensurate with a convicted child sex abuser not reporting to local law enforcement. Upon receipt of the travel itinerary, the U.S. government informs the destination country or countries of those plans.
The destination country or countries are then empowered with actionable information to render the traveler inadmissible.
The law is working as intended. In just over two years, the U.S. government has notified foreign governments of the planned travel of 10,541 covered sex offenders to their countries. As of July — 3,681 individuals who were convicted of sex crimes against children were denied entry by these nations.
Internationally, I serve as the Special Representative for Combatting Human Trafficking in the Parliamentary Assembly of the Organization for Cooperation and Security in Europe. I’ve offered 20 resolutions over the years, beginning in 1999 in St. Petersburg, Russia, which were approved — each focusing on new and effective strategies, including Megan’s Law and International Megan’s Law — to be merged with each nation’s ongoing work.
Last January, President Trump signed my fifth anti-human trafficking bill into law — the Frederick Douglass Trafficking Victims Prevention and Protection Act.
Of particular importance, the new Frederick Douglass Act authorizes the secretary of Health and Human Services, in consultation with the secretary of Education and the secretary of Labor, to award grants to local educational agencies, in partnership with a nonprofit, nongovernmental agency, to establish, expand, and support programs to educate staff and provide information to students.
According to the International Labor Organization (ILO), one in four trafficking victims are children and more than 40 million individuals of all ages are living in slavery worldwide.
Out of the 24.9 million people trapped in forced labor, 16 million people are exploited in the private sector such as domestic work, construction or agriculture; 4.8 million persons in forced sexual exploitation, and 4 million persons in forced labor imposed by state authorities.
According to the Polaris Project, sex trafficking within residences informally used as brothels typically involves child victims, with boys making up a growing percentage.
Today as never before, traffickers are using Internet communication technologies (ICTs) to lure children into trafficking. According to a National Center for Missing and Exploited Children study, the average age of online enticement that can result in being trafficked was 15.
When I introduced the legislation, Frederick Douglass’ great, great, great grandson, Kenneth Morris, spoke at the press conference underscoring the critical need to educate our youth, a main focus of the Frederick Douglass Family Initiatives Organization.
Kenneth Morris said, “If my great ancestor were here today, I believe that he would be driven to lead the struggle against contemporary forms of slavery.”
Do we need more laws? Maybe. But more than anything else, we need to further prioritize combatting human trafficking, including and especially through prosecution.
• Chris Smith is a U.S. representative from New Jersey. This op-ed was excerpted from remarks he delivered to the County Prosecutors Association of New Jersey earlier this month.
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