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2022 Trafficking in Persons (TIP) Report

By Paulina Andrews and Emily Tegley

2022 Trafficking in Persons (TIP) Report

On July 19, 2022, the U.S. Department of State released the 2022 Trafficking in Persons (TIP) Report. The TIP Report is federally mandated by the Trafficking Victims Protection Act (TVPA). Each year, the TIP Report evaluates global anti-trafficking efforts and ranks countries into three tiers based on whether the countries have met the TVPA’s minimum standards.

Ranking System:

The 2022 TIP Report’s three-tier system ranks countries based on each country’s efforts to prosecute traffickers, protect trafficking victims, and prevent human trafficking. The tiers are based on the country’s efforts to address human trafficking and not on the size of the country’s human trafficking problem.

Countries that have made efforts to fully meet the TVPA’s minimum standards are placed in Tier 1. Tier 2 status is reserved for countries that have not fully met the TVPA’s minimum standards but are “making significant efforts to bring themselves into compliance with those standards.” The Tier 2 Watch List includes countries that have made efforts to meet the TVPA’s minimum standards, but: (1) “the estimated number of victims of severe forms of trafficking is very significant or significantly increasing and the country is not taking proportional concrete actions”; or (2) “there is a failure to provide evidence of increasing efforts to combat severe forms of trafficking in persons from the previous year.” Countries that do not meet the TVPA’s minimum standards and are not working to meet the standards are placed in Tier 3. Countries in Tier 3 may not be eligible for non-humanitarian and non-trade related funding.

The 2022 TIP Report also emphasizes the importance of ethically engaging survivors, seeking survivors’ input in decision-making, and employing survivors in a trauma-informed work environment. To achieve these goals, the TIP Report provides recommendations such as: encouraging organizations to budget for hiring survivors; ensuring organizations have obtained informed consent from a survivor before sharing the survivor’s story; compensating survivors appropriately for their time; and fostering a safe, trauma-informed environment in the workplace. Furthermore, the TIP Report addresses how survivors have diverse backgrounds and encourages anti-trafficking efforts to acknowledge that there is no “‘typical’ survivor or story.”  On July 20, the U.S. State Department held a briefing on this year’s TIP report, where the panel echoed the importance of having survivor-informed programs and policies. In keeping with this goal, the U.S. State Department relied on the U.S. Advisory Council on Human Trafficking, an appointed group of survivor leaders who advise and make recommendations on federal anti-trafficking policies, as subject matter experts to aid with the introductory materials for this year’s report, which is a tool to begin a global conversation on the inclusion of survivor expertise. Further, the panel noted that a dramatic increase in governments actively seeking survivor input could already be seen.

The United States:

The United States maintained its Tier 1 status in 2022, indicating the United States government has made efforts to meet the TVPA’s minimum standards. The TIP Report notes that the United States has maintained prosecution efforts and passed additional legislation to protect victims. For example, the TIP Report cites legislation the United States Congress enacted requiring credit reporting companies to remove adverse credit activity from victims’ reports when that credit activity is connected to their victimization. Additionally, the TIP Report explains the United States has improved its overall protection efforts by increasing the number of victims served and continuing to fund anti-trafficking efforts. Lastly, the TIP Report praised the United States’ prevention efforts, including its three-year national action plan to combat trafficking and ongoing public outreach efforts.

However, the TIP Report makes clear that Tier 1 status does not mean “a country has no human trafficking problem or that it is doing enough to address the crime.” Thus, the United States’ Tier 1 status does not mean the United States has a perfect response to human trafficking, and the TIP Report highlights various areas the United States needs to improve. For example, while the TIP Report indicates that the United States continues to reduce demand, the report also notes that advocates argue this demand-reduction must be trauma-informed, must be survivor-informed, and that diverse experiences and voices must be prioritized. In addition, the TIP Report notes the United States’ response to protecting LGBTQI+ individuals and children who are aging out of services is insufficient.

Furthermore, the TIP Report highlights that trafficking survivors continue to face criminal charges resulting from their victimization. Comprehensive victim protection laws are essential to ensuring survivors are identified and equipped to heal from their trafficking victimization and, if they choose to do so, join anti-trafficking efforts. Additionally, the TIP Report notes that criminal records resulting from the traffickers’ victimization exclude survivors from employment opportunities, housing, higher education, government programs, and from meeting their basic needs. The TIP Report also cites cases where trafficking survivors lost custody of their children because the survivors were required to register as sex offenders due to offenses the survivors committed as a result of being trafficked. To address this issue, the TIP Report encourages state, local, and tribal authorities to “implement policies not to prosecute victims for unlawful acts traffickers compelled them to commit.”

Shared Hope International’s Work:

In 2011, Shared Hope launched the Protected Innocence Challenge project, finding most states failed to recognize the crime of child sex trafficking. Under the project, Shared Hope graded each state on the strength of their laws regarding criminalization of child sex trafficking, offender accountability, tools for investigation and prosecution, and victim protections. By 2019, states had made great progress in areas related to criminalization, but service responses lagged. Shared Hope then retired the Protected Innocence Challenge project and released the Report Cards on Child & Youth Sex Trafficking legislative framework, building on the original Protected Innocence Challenge project and preserving its most fundamental components, but including new policy priorities that focus largely on specialized service responses and access to justice. These policies put survivor protections at the forefront of Shared Hope’s ongoing advocacy efforts.

This advanced legislative framework can be used as a tool for lawmakers seeking to address many of the recommendations found in the 2022 TIP Report. For example, to address and respond to the harmful and re-traumatizing effects of arrest and prosecution, the advanced legislative framework recommends that states enact laws to prevent the arrest, detention, and prosecution of children who have committed crimes as a result of their victimization. Specifically, states can take concrete steps to prevent additional trauma by prohibiting the criminalization of minors under 18 for prostitution offenses, prohibiting the criminalization of sex trafficking victims for non-violent crimes and trafficking and commercial sexual exploitation offenses committed as a result of their victimization, and providing victims with an affirmative defense for violent felonies committed as a result of their trafficking victimization. The criminalization of survivors is concerning, and while there has been an increase in awareness, gaps still remain in written policies seeking to prevent the criminalization of survivors.

Additionally, Shared Hope’s JuST Response Council, a group of over 30 experts from around the country who collaborate to improve responses to child sex trafficking, released field guidance on responding to sex trafficking victim-offender intersectionality and the complexities of charging victims of trafficking with offenses committed as a result of being trafficked. The Victim-Offender Intersectionality Report discusses not only why criminalizing survivors is inherently unjust, but also offers approaches for applying a sex trafficking-informed lens.

Shared Hope Resources:

Take Action:

  • Get informed. Visit the U.S. State Department’s website to review the entire 2022 Trafficking in Persons Report.
  • Advocate for change. Send your state’s report card to your legislators.
  • Join the fight. Sign Shared Hope’s Stop the InJuSTice Campaign petition to encourage states to stop arresting and charging child sex trafficking survivors with prostitution.

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Legislative Update Series: State Juvenile Justice and Access to Services

As Congress heads into Summer Recess and 27 of the 46 states in session in 2022 have adjourned for the calendar year, Shared Hope is doing a legislative update blog series on state and federal laws that have been introduced and enacted with the potential to impact survivors of child and youth sex trafficking. In the first blog we focused on state non-criminalization laws. In this second blog we look at state laws that impact juvenile justice and access to services.

Another priority issue in this year’s state legislative sessions has been juvenile justice. Many children who have been commercially sexually exploited have been involved in the juvenile justice system, either prior to their exploitation or as a result of their victimization. It is critical that juvenile justice agencies, as child serving entities, know how to properly identify victims at risk of child sex trafficking and sexual exploitation and provide access to specialized services to ensure that they avoid harsh punitive measures. A number of states introduced legislation. Notably, Tennessee passed SB1037/HB1100 amends the Code to require the Department of Children’s Services, the Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges, and other agencies to work together to develop a mechanism to identify and provide services to sexually abused or trafficked children. Additionally, Tennessee legislature passed SB2400/HB2147, which requires the Tennessee Department of Children’s Services to develop screening/assessment tools to evaluate at risk system-involved youth and require distribution to Department of Juvenile Justice for use with justice-involved youth. Additionally, SB2400/HB2147 provides certain protections to child sex trafficking victims in the courts, including raising the age in which minors can use CCTV in a courtroom to testify from 13 years old to 18 years old requiring the juvenile court to consider past trauma or abuse, including trafficking victimization, when deciding of whether to transfer a juvenile to adult court consistent with Shared Hope’s framework. Finally, SB2400/HB2147 provides affirmative defense for minor victims to trafficking charge and provides sentencing mitigation provision based on duress as a trafficking victim

Other notable juvenile justice legislation enacted this year by state legislatures include:

  • California SB827 Repeals provisions that authorize a prosecutor to begin a criminal case against a minor in a criminal court and that would impose an adult sentence for a minor convicted in criminal court and not transferred to juvenile court; authorizes a person who is 19 to 24 years of age to petition for a return to a juvenile facility, to conform with the age of eligibility for a petition to transfer to an adult facility.
  • Maryland HB459/SB691 raises the minimum age a child can be charged in juvenile court to 13, consistent with Shared Hope’s framework and international standards.
  • Nevada AB230 eliminates the mandatory certification of a child as an adult for certain offenses and provides instead for the discretionary certification of a child for criminal proceedings as an adult for all offenses over which the juvenile court has exclusive jurisdiction.
  • New York A8739 increases minimum age for juvenile court jurisdiction to 12 years of age and increases maximum age for juvenile court jurisdiction to include older minors (16 & 17) for certain offenses age for juvenile court jurisdiction.

Access to Services

Ensuring that comprehensive, trauma-informed, individualized services are provided to victims is vital. Without access to services, victims remain at risk of re-exploitation. Shared Hope supports states’ use of multiple entry points for child survivors to receive specialized services, including child welfare, juvenile justice, and non-system involved entry points such as regional navigators or Minnesota’s No Wrong Door model.

A number of states passed legislation that would expand access to services for children and youth survivors of sex trafficking. Tennessee passed sweeping reform, including SB2739/HB2591 which requires the Department of Children’s Services and the Department of Human Services to collaborate to provide recommendations to the General Assembly on resources and services specific to persons from 18 to 24 years of age who have been victims of child sex trafficking. Additionally, Tennessee passed SB2740/HB2592 which requires several states agencies to develop recommendations on the creation of multidisciplinary teams to provide responses specific to child sex trafficking cases and SB2400/HB2147 which requires human trafficking non-profits to sit on child welfare investigation MDTs for all child sex trafficking cases. SB2400/HB2147 also requires child welfare to determine specialized services for child sex trafficking victims and requires Department of Children’s Services to develop policy for serving foreign national child victims.

Other notable juvenile justice bills include Delaware’s HB271 which amends state law to requires the Delaware Department of Services for Children, Youth, and Their Families to provide transitional services beginning at 16 years old and expands eligibility from under 21 to under 23 years of age which was enacted and Maine’s HP605 which adds child sex trafficking to definition of abuse and removes caregiver barrier for child sex trafficking cases to ensure that victims are able to access services through a child welfare response.

Supporting Resources:

To learn more about state legislation that addresses the needs of sex trafficking victims and to take action in support of this critical issue, please visit Shared Hope’s State Advocacy Action Center.

If you are a lawmaker or advocate seeking to craft strong laws to fight juvenile sex trafficking and wish to speak with Shared Hope’s Policy Team for technical assistance, please visit request a consultation.

 

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Walking in the Present: Shared Hope Reflects on Women’s History Month Part 2

By Nancy Winston, Senior Director

For Linda Smith, it all began with a filthy wisp of a girl, bold enough to cling to her skirt as she experienced India’s wretched brothels for the first time. Jolted into suddenly believing what had seemed just too far-fetched—that children were being sold for sex on the streets of Mumbai—the representative from U.S. Congress immediately felt the call to be a champion for those little ones. [Read more…]

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Walking Through History: Shared Hope Reflects on Women’s History Month Part 1

By: Shauna Devitt, Senior Communications Manager

In March we celebrate Women’s History Month, a time to commemorate and celebrate women; women in history, women in the workforce, women who are breaking barriers, women working to eradicate sex trafficking. Women like Shared Hope International’s Founder and President, Linda Smith, who has been a pioneer legislator and anti-trafficking advocate, empowering others to join her in the fight to eradicate domestic minor sex trafficking.

[Read more…]

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Pornography and Trafficking: Unpacking the Links

Written by Dr. Gail Dines, a Professor Emerita of Sociology and Women’s Studies

In the 1970s and 80s, feminists argued that prostitution could not be separated from porn, or as Andrea Dworkin so succinctly stated, “porn is prostitution with the camera going.”[i] Over the ensuing decades, however, there have been both theoretical and political attempts to disentangle porn from prostitution, leading to a truncated analysis of both porn and prostitution. In this discussion, I am using the terms “prostitution” and “trafficking” interchangeably because, as Farley writes, “More than 80% of the time, women in the sex industry are under pimp-control, that is what trafficking is.”[ii]

Moreover, “Pornography also meets the legal definition of trafficking if the pornographer recruits, entices, or obtains women for the purpose of photographing live commercial sex acts.”[iii]  Beyond the legal perspective, the linkages between porn and trafficking go much deeper.

To better understand the linkages between porn and trafficking, and how they are similar in some respects (and different in others), the business concept of “value chains” is useful. Value chains refer to the whole range of activities involved in making and selling a product or service, from sourcing components to production, distribution, and consumption. The idea of the value chain is that “value” is added at each stage, though the term “harm chain” is more appropriate for porn and trafficking, because each stage causes harm to women—the sex industry’s “product.” Only the companies and pimps involved make a profit.

The first link in the harm chain is recruitment.[iv] In terms of porn and trafficking, this means grooming and enticing women into the sex industry. Studies show that the recruitment of women into both porn and trafficking relies on the same dynamics. On a macro-level, the most powerful recruiter is a hyper-sexualized porn culture that socializes girls and women to self-objectify and self-sexualize. Yes, it is the culture that grooms girls and women to be pimped into porn and prostitution. As Joanna Angel, a hardcore pornography producer and performer, told Details magazine, “the girls these days, just seem to come to the set porn-ready.”[v] In a similar vein, an incarcerated child-rapist told me in an interview that grooming his ten-year-old step-daughter, whom he later went on to rape, was not difficult because “the culture did lot of the grooming for me.”[vi]

Both the pornographer and the rapist, working from the same “playbook,” recognize and harvest the power of the pornified visual landscape to indoctrinate girls and women into a patriarchal mindset that the only way to be visible— in fact valuable— is to be sexually desired, “hot,” and pornified.

The pimps entice women and girls into the porn industry with promises of becoming a celebrity, with the attendant wealth and visibility this affords. They point to the sex-tapes of celebrities such as Paris Hilton and Kim Kardashian that jump-started both women’s climb to fame.

What the pimps fail to point out is that because these women are extremely wealthy celebrities, leaking a sex tape actually amplifies their fame and fortune. If these women were poor and unknown, they’d be saddled with the term “slut” and their lives, as studies have shown, would be upended. And women of color suffer even greater social humiliation and degradation.

The promise of wealth is a powerful form of enticement because the majority of women in the sex industry are poor, and in an ever-growing world of income inequality, have few choices to move up the socio-economic ladder. Women of color are especially at risk of poverty being poor because of the systemic racism that limits access to good schools and job-training programs.

Probably one of the most powerful factors that drives women into the sex industry is, as Donevan argues, childhood sexual abuse. Donevan found this to be “the most common precursor to prostitution, with studies finding that between 60-90% of prostituted persons have been subject to sexualized abuse in childhood.”[vii] Donevan points to a study by Grudzen et al.,[viii] that found that women in porn were three times more likely to have been victims of childhood sexual abuse compared to women who were not in porn.

The “product” of both porn and prostitution is the sexual exploitation of women. The only other industry where the product is the buying and selling of human bodies is slavery, which is why survivors and their allies call the sex industry sexual slavery, not “sex work.”

Men pay for the experience of sexually degrading and debasing a woman, turning her, in their minds, into a “whore” who is deserving of sexual violence. The consumers simultaneously construct, cement, and bolster their sex-class power, as they produce and reproduce women as an oppressed class in the patriarchal relations of production. The monetization of women as “product” is different in porn compared with prostitution, because porn images and videos are mass-marketed and distributed online on an industrial scale through multinational conglomerates such as Mindgeek.[ix]

The chain of harms women suffer in pornography and prostitution have been well documented.[x] Moreover, these harms are not unfortunate “byproducts,” but are central to the value (sexual pleasure) to the user. The more brutal, cruel, and violent the “sex” act, the more the users feel as though they got their money’s worth. Reading the Adult DVD Talk forum, a website where porn users discuss their favorite scenes, makes clear just how much users are indeed on the lookout for scenes where the woman is suffering real pain. A popular thread—called Painful Anal—has numerous posts where fans list their favorite scenes and discuss at great length their enjoyment at watching the woman cry, scream, or show fear.

Once in the revolving door of the sex-industry, the women often end up even poorer than when they started. Lack of health care benefits means that women have to pay out of pocket for treating STIs, bodily injury, and PTSD. The now-shuttered Adult Industry Medical Health Care Association, which was the Los Angeles-based voluntary organization in charge of testing porn performers, had a list on their website of possible injuries and diseases to which porn performers were prone. These included HIV; rectal and throat gonorrhea; tearing of the throat, vagina, and anus; and chlamydia of the eye. Not your everyday workplace ailments, unless, of course, you are being prostituted, on or off camera.

The distribution end of the harm chain for pornography used to look very different from prostitution. The former requires an ecosystem of websites producers, directors, filmmakers, webmasters, web-based payment systems, and distribution networks. Prostitution, on the other hand, was typically a more low-tech and leaner value chain, in which production and consumption were two aspects of the same sexual act— the buying and selling of women.

However, pornography and prostitution are becoming even more inseparable today with the growing popularity of sex camming, where (mostly) women livestream sex acts for men who pay for private shows.[xi] One of the most popular sex-camming sites is Chaturbate, with an estimated 18.5 million unique visitors, just in the US, and has an Alexa rank of 21. Chaturbate, like the other sex-camming platforms, plays the role of pimp by taking 50% of the women’s earnings. It also has a “referral” system where affiliates receive $50 per “model” who signs up via the affiliate site, thus expanding the chain of pimps.

The concept of harm chains is generally used to suggest how harms from making and distributing products such as clothes and coffee can be reduced or minimized. None of these suggestions on how to reduce harm apply to the sex industry. The very nature of this industry is to create harm on the micro level–to the women’s and girls’ bodies–and on the macro level, the normalization, glorification and monetization of sexual violence. The sex industry inherently and irredeemably reinforces a culture and economy that victimizes and subordinates women and girls as a sex-class. The only way to stop the harm chain is to close down the sex industry. Only this will enable women and girls to live a full life in which their civil and human rights are fully valued.

 

Dr. Gail Dines, a Professor Emerita of Sociology and Women’s Studies, is President of Culture Reframed, a research-driven non-profit dedicated to building resilience and resistance in young people to porn culture. She is the author of Pornland: How porn has Hijacked our Sexuality, (Beacon Press), which has been translated into five languages, Her TEDx talk can be seen here.

 

[i] Speech given by Andrea Dworkin at the “Sexual Liberals and the Attack on Feminism” Conference, NYC, April 6th, 1987

[ii] Farley, Melissa & Donevan, Meghan (in press, 2021).

Reconnecting Pornography, Prostitution, and Trafficking: ‘The experience of being in porn was like being destroyed, run over, again and again’

Atlánticas, an International Journal of Feminist Studies, 6 (2)

[iii] Ibid.

[iv] For a more extended discussion of recruitment into the sex industry see Donevan, M. (2021). “In This Industry, You’re No Longer Human”: An Exploratory Study of Women’s Experiences in Pornography Production in Sweden. Dignity: A Journal of Analysis of Exploitation and Violence, 6(3), 1.

[v] Details Magazine, February, 2010.

[vi] For a more detailed discussion, see Dines, G. (2010). Pornland: How porn has hijacked our sexuality. Beacon Press. Chapter Six: Visible or Invisible: Growing up Female in a Porn Culture

[vii] Donevan, ibid.

[viii] Grudzen, C. R., Meeker, D., Torres, J. M., Du, Q., Morrison, R. S., Andersen, R. M., & Gelberg, L. (2011). Comparison of the mental health of female adult film performers and other young women in California. Psychiatric Services, 62(6), 639-645.

[ix] For further discussion of MindGeek see Dines, G, “There is no such thing as IT”: Toward a Critical Understanding of the Porn Industry. In Brunskell-Evans, H. (Ed.). (2017). The Sexualized Body and the Medical Authority of Pornography: Performing Sexual Liberation. Cambridge Scholars Publishing.

[x] See, for example, Moran, R. (2015). Paid for: My journey through prostitution. WW Norton & Company.

[xi] https://nordicmodelnow.org/2020/10/24/3-dangerous-myths-about-webcamming-debunked/

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