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Human Trafficking

Are Problem-Solving Courts Impeding Progress?

“When New York State created a network of 12 Human Trafficking Intervention Courts, criminal justice professionals hailed it as an innovation,” writes Christina Goldbaum for the New York Times. “The courts send people into counseling sessions to help them leave the multibillion-dollar sex trade while dismissing their charges and sealing their records.” New York’s court isn’t alone. Courts […]

FOSTA Backers to Sex Workers: Your Work Can Never Be Safe

On April 11, President Trump signed the Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (FOSTA), legislation that would make it possible to hold the operators of websites criminally and civilly liable if third parties were found to have posted advertisements for prostitution. Days before the legislation was enacted, however, federal authorities seized Backpage.com, essentially locking sex […]

A National Campaign to Crack Down on Massage Businesses May Harm the Women it Wants to Help

Polaris, a Washington, D.C.-based non-governmental organization best known for operating the National Human Trafficking Hotline, says it has located a new front in the fight against human trafficking: what it describes as “illicit massage businesses,” or IMBs. The nonprofit, which brought in $10 million in 2016 (of which $2.1 million is government funding, according to IRS […]

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New Orleans Strip Club Workers Battle ‘Age Ban’ In Federal Court

Last week, days after dancers took to the streets of New Orleans to protest recent police raids on the city’s strip clubs, the state agency that led them was in the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals fending off a challenge to a Louisiana law barring 18-, 19-, and 20-year-olds from working as strip club dancers. In 2016, long before the raids, […]

In ‘Anti-Trafficking’ New Orleans Strip Club Raids, Police Make No Trafficking Arrests

The New Orleans Police Department, the Louisiana State Police, and the Louisiana Office of Alcohol and Tobacco Control (ATC) have raided eight French Quarter strip clubs in the past 10 days. At a Monday press conference, both NOPD and ATC claimed the raids were the result of a multi-month, ongoing “human trafficking” operation, yet they also admitted they made no trafficking arrests, nor did they identify any victims of trafficking.

Proposed Federal Trafficking Legislation Has Surprising Opponents: Advocates Who Work With Trafficking Victims

Congress is marking “National Slavery and Human Trafficking Prevention Month” by considering major anti-sex trafficking legislation in both houses. The bills use different approaches but would both target websites, such as Backpage, where sexual services are advertised. Yet neither bill will result in justice for victims of human trafficking, anti-trafficking advocates and service providers told The […]

Broken Covenant: A Homeless Youth Organization’s Assault on Trafficking Is Making Women More Vulnerable

It looked like a flyer promoting Bourbon Street strip clubs: purple, magenta and black, with neon light-styled letters spelling out the name of then-New Orleans mayoral candidate, Desiree Charbonnet. But it wasn’t a flyer. It was an opposition mailer, sent just before the hotly-contested November election. Under a photograph of Charbonnet, the mailer stated, “In December […]

Trafficking In Vagaries: How A Times Picayune Series That Found Only “trafficking opportunity” In Strip Clubs Paved The Way For A Bourbon Street Crackdown

A proposal to curb strip clubs on Bourbon Street was introduced last Thursday by a New Orleans city council member, “citing recent reports from NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune on unfettered sex trafficking at the adult venues.” Just a few days after the paper’s first story appeared, Mayor Mitch Landrieu had already hired an attorney to investigate the clubs. It’s not surprising that a […]