What's the rationale behind the objections to these measures against human trafficking?

Question

In the state I live there are some measures being discussed that are meant to combat human trafficking. A couple of the ones I've heard are:

1. One is to close down illicit massage parlors

2. Another is for hotel workers to report suspected victims of human trafficking (who are likely underage)

Now, I've heard that there is some controversy to these suggestions. Some say that 1 will force victims out onto the streets and into more dangerous situations. I don't understand this objection as I had imagined that shutting down the shop would include rescue.

An objection to 2 I heard was that 2 would put victims at higher risk of retribution from traffickers, and that it should only be done with the consent of the victim. This too I do not understand, as I thought there would be discretion on part of the law and that victims might have a hard time speaking up.

Could someone explain the measures and the objections further? Some of these come from advocacy groups and while I value their insight and respect their work I have a hard time fully understanding. I don't know how to ask but I would also appreciate hearing any other aspects of the debate too

Answer 1

For case 1, the unstated assumptions are that prostitution will take place regardless of the government's attempts to stop it, and even if there are illicit massage parlors populated with victims of human trafficking, there are also illicit massage parlors with voluntary prostitutes. The voluntary prostitutes will not be "rescued" because, they don't need "rescuing" and if they keep doing sex work they will do it elsewhere. There are many values of "elsewhere" more dangerous for the prostitute and less desirable for society than an illicit massage parlor, e.g. city streets.

For case 2, most mandatory reporting laws require that the mandatory reporter's personally identifying information be taken and made available. This information may be published to other law enforcement personnel and may appear in court documents depending on how a case proceeds. The reporter therefore can be subject to intimidation. Also, if you know who the reporter is, it is a trivial exercise for a criminal organization to determine when and where that person works and therefore determine who is likely to be the victim that caused the report to be filed.

Answer 2

Another is for hotel workers to report suspected victims of human trafficking (who are likely underage)

To add to the other answers, one problem with this is that is causes severe problems for people with uncommon family structures that frequently can resemble human trafficking to well-meaning, but untrained, people. This is particularly a problem for people who have adopted children of a different race or people whose children don't look very much like them.

Young black men tend to fit a stereotype of a human trafficker more than a middle-aged white person would. So a young black man with a daughter who looks white may be reported to police while a middle-aged white man with a daughter who looks white may not be in an otherwise identical situation. These types of situations tend to occur in hotels as parents may be carrying a child who passed out in the car, children may throw temper tantrums, and so on. These kinds of events are often not handled particularly well by police and there are some horror stories involving children separated from their parents and interrogated in ways that severely affected them.

The problem is simply that people whose families just happen to resemble untrained people's stereotypes of human trafficking will wind up having unpleasant encounters with police in situations involving them and their small children. It's like police stopping people who "don't look like they belong in this neighborhood", but worse.

Will specific employees be trained in recognizing actual signs of human trafficking or coerced sex work and accurately relay their suspicions to police? Or will every employee be told to report anything they think as suspicious based on their personal life experiences and biases about what a family looks like in a way that doesn't accurately convey the possibility of innocent explanations? The former might be unobjectionable, but the fear is that we'll actually get the latter.

Answer 3

The measures you're describing don't target trafficking, but sex work. They mean that sex workers will move away from high-visibility areas where they're less likely to come to harm but are more likely to be noticed by the authorities, and into more dangerous situations.

For example, if they can't work out of hotels without getting arrested for being a victim of trafficking (and yes, despite being the ostensible victim, they're often arrested), then they'll bring their clients back to their houses instead, with obvious risks if a client feels entitled to more than is being offered.

Sex workers are more likely to turn to any source of protection, which will lead to them being more likely to be trafficked.

All of this is also ignoring the fact that most trafficking victims in the US are not sex workers but domestic staff. It's attacking the wrong problem and then using the worst possible approach to do so.

Answer 4

One issue with the second proposal as you've phrased it is that hotel workers run the gamut from cleaners to managers; is every hotel worker supposed to get training on recognizing human trafficking at a glance? How effective is that training, in reality? One anecdote from the comments:

Anecdotal evidence, but from talking to a police officer, the ability of hotel workers to recognize sex trafficking ranges from "bad joke" to "highly counterproductive". Every single case of "child prostitution" he'd been sent to investigate turned out to be a father traveling with his daughter (most often, black father with light-skinned daughter), while adult prostitution was either father/teenage daughter, or college-age couple (again, with an over-representation of mixed-race pairs).

I imagine many hotels have high turnover rates, so I would expect the industry to object on the cost of training all employees to spot human trafficking.

Third, I would also expect the industry to be reticent to start accusing their patrons of human trafficking - especially those with wealthy clientele - even if they don't state it publicly. Imagine the media storm if a Hilton accused a parent of trafficking based on the skin color and appearance of their adopted child.

Answer 5

I had imagined that shutting down the shop would include rescue.

A huge point you are missing, is that people who are in such a situation (of actually needing rescue) are inexperienced, isolated, dependent, and terrified of engagement with authorities - often for good reason unfortunately.

• They have no other contacts.
• They may be deported.
• They may have been told terrible things will happen to them.
• They may be dependent for drugs or other things.
• They may have children or relatives overseas who will be (or who they have been told will be) at risk, or separated, or suffer.
• They may have been told they owe money (for "rent", or for their own trafficking) and fear for their safety or feel duty bound to comply as they owe their trafficker.
• They don't know the country well, are often very linguistically disadvantaged, impoverished, and easily manipulated
• They may be at risk of arrest - whatever police and authorities should do, the reality is that most of the time the victims will be seen as being in the wrong - arrested, charged with any number of crimes, drug possession, whatever.
• In a disturbing number of cases where police intrude on sex work, an outcome is that the police officers implicitly act as if they have a right to take possessions they see, demand sex, hint that "if taken care of" they will "go easy" and so on. The justice system majors in victim blaming, and even medical help may be prefunctory or based on prejudice about the victims.

Yes you can rescue people in that situation, and yes they desperately need it, but these issues present a huge barrier, and if you just shut the shops, you will expose people to those risks and realities, snd you will not necessarily be able to avoid that (hard to change police/justice/social care/medical culture and popular perceptions).

Rescue isn't as easy as it sounds, and people with those fears and realities may fear "I'm from the government and I'm here to help", more than almost anything else, because their current reality at least is a "known".

So you need to think hard, how people and traffickers/manipulators in that situation will act/respond, when faced with a public policy of that kind. The answers will probably be disturbing. If your imagination picks ideals then you need to reflect on your privileges and their past realities. Someone with poor English, isolated, manipulated, cut out from their family/"herd", facing a violent and abusive boyfriend/manager/pimp, maybe needing cash now not "some time", maybe dependent on drugs, documents taken "for safekeeping", having seen (and if not seen, certainly heard of) peers who got cut up or beaten up or put in hospital, ... you need to think in their reality not yours, to really help.

If you do, the answers become much less clearcut, because a lot of the answer is about how we (politicians, police, medical, justice, authorities generally, wider society) need to change and accept we're actually doing things wrongly, rather than the usual popular/political way it's presented and understood: which is put crudely, mostly about how we can get a quick dose of feel-goods from an easy "obvious" well-defined rescue, with big readily understood banners, clearly defined good people/bad people, and (for politicians) good TV soundbites. But solving this problem in a real way, often flounders because it isn't simple, and the implementation of any solution is hard as heck, with every step a battle.

Answer 6

Some say that [closing down illicit massage parlors] will force victims out onto the streets and into more dangerous situations. I don't understand this objection as I had imagined that shutting down the shop would include rescue.

The thing to keep in mind is that people respond to incentives. If the government shuts down too many massage parlors, pimps will move their operations before their parlors are shut down. At the very least, new operations will be less likely to use massage parlors.

The magnitude of this effect depends on the cost of moving and the level of enforcement, but at least in theory, the number of prostitutes who move to the street may be much higher than the number who are arrested and/or rescued. (The fact that not all prostitutes are coerced has already been brought up.)

Answer 7

Point 2 has two major issues

The first is that it places an impossible responsibility on those hotel workers. Without training, without backup, without evidence, and not least without pay, they are effectively being drafted as deputies for your border control force. If they get it wrong and someone is actually trafficked, they can be convicted for not reporting them even if they didn't know. This has actually happened in the UK for a similar law involving illegal immigrants. And if they get it wrong and someone actually is not trafficked, that person could sue them for the resulting trouble and loss of time and reputation.

The other problem though is that all border forces do consider victims of trafficking to be illegal immigrants, basically because they are. There are efforts in various countries to improve the situation, but I'm not aware of any which have really turned the situation around on the ground. Certainly the US and most of Europe take this attitude. Europe has introduced laws on modem slavery which allow the traffickers to be put away, but this doesn't necessarily help their trafficked victims.

Answer 8

1. If a massage parlor is "illicit" the police are supposed to be shutting them down already. Without describing the specific measure, it begs the question what would change about this. However, I do question the assumption that a sex trafficking victim is somehow "safer" working in a massage parlor. Safer than what? It is difficult for most people to comprehend the degree of suffering these victims must endure.
2. Mandatory reporting creates multiple issues. While it is true that hotel workers have a financial incentive to turn a blind eye, simply requiring that they report potential victims carries both legal and practical consequences. Are police going to kick down doors now because some 17-year-old thinks something is suspicious? And if that 17-year-old kid decides to grant benefit of the doubt, does he go to prison now? Hotel front desk workers are not first responders, teachers, doctors, therapists, or any of the other classes of trusted professionals normally burdened with this legal obligation; and it is not reasonable to expect this of them, in my opinion. Instead, we should simply be grateful for what vigilance they are capable of.