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November 4, 2021 by Guest

The role of the National Defense Authorization Act in supporting victims of sex trafficking.

Dr. Marian Hatcher
Shared Hope Policy Consultant
Ambassador-at-Large, United Nations

This blog addresses two bills which recently passed the House through their incorporation into the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). If the NDAA is passed by Congress with these provisions, this would significantly increase a survivor’s quality of life by addressing credit and housing concerns for those impacted by trafficking.

The first bill is the Debt Bondage Repair Act (DBRA), which was also introduced in the Senate. The DBRA addresses the difficulties that trafficking survivors face in obtaining financial freedom due to low credit scores caused by their victimization. The terms “good credit” and “credit score” by design define and measure success or failure, determining what you can buy and where you can live. Survivors of sexual exploitation are very often not in control of what appears on their credit report due to coercion by exploiters. This leaves them with crushing debt and limited options for acquiring loans necessary for future opportunities.

The second bill is the Trafficking Survivors Housing Act (TSHA), which has been introduced in the House and Senate and would provide a roadmap for increasing trafficking survivors’ access to short- and long-term housing, both of which are critical to stabilization, increased safety and an overall sense of normalcy and wellbeing.

The key provisions of both the DBRA and the TSHA are currently in the non-defense section of the (NDAA) under sections 5104 and 5113. It is critical they remain there.

Specifically, the DBRA, initially referred to the Senate in June 2021, would prohibit consumer reporting agencies from furnishing a consumer report containing any adverse item of information about a consumer if such consumer is a victim of trafficking and the adverse report resulted from the trafficking victimization.

This legislation is close to my heart, as it was inspired by my testimony given last spring to the U.S. House Committee on Financial Services. Ranking Member Patrick McHenry understood how the impact of a vehicle purchased in my name for my exploiter, which was/is still reflected on my credit report from nearly 20 years ago, has harmed both my credit history and my emotional wellbeing.

Most importantly, the DBRA provides survivors an opportunity for financial independence and stability that can help end the cycle of exploitation.

Good credit history is essential for opening bank accounts and applying for loans, credit cards, insurance, and housing. Credit reports are also sometimes necessary when applying for student loans, and utility and cellphone service contracts. Individuals with adverse credit history and low credit scores experience higher interest rates or denial altogether.

The TSHA is equally as important as it would require the United States Interagency Council on Homelessness to coordinate with key federal stakeholders, housing advocates, service providers and survivors and others to study the availability of housing or survivors of trafficking, and those at risk of trafficking due to homelessness or housing insecurity.

When examining the consequences of exploitation, it is often the immediate needs that are addressed in a coordinated manner, and rightly so. It is however critical to look at the long-term impact on victims and survivors as these two bills will do.

In 2019, two of the top five risk factors for trafficking victimization were being a runaway or homeless youth and unstable housing.^[i] The lack of affordable and accessible housing is also a critical barrier to aiding victims in leaving their trafficking situation and providing services to trafficking survivors. However, to address this complex issue as part of a comprehensive approach to combatting trafficking, research is needed to better understand the specific housing gaps and barriers to accessing housing that trafficking survivors experience.

A 2002 study by the Chicago Coalition for the Homeless, Unlocking Options For Women, that surveyed 235 women in Cook County Jail, helps to demonstrate the likely prevalence of homelessness among trafficking survivors and those at risk of sex trafficking, and the resulting need to better understand how to respond to this growing problem. When looking at prostitution and homelessness “[a] majority (58 percent) of women who stated they were homeless in the 30 days prior to entering Cook County Jail reported being regularly involved in prostitution. Of those, 26 percent regularly prostituted for a place to stay. Thirty-one percent of women who said they were regularly involved in prostitution had experienced homelessness before the age of 18.” Addressing housing is also critical from a prevention perspective, as individuals experiencing housing instability and homelessness are more likely to become trafficking victims. 64% of trafficking survivors reported being homeless or experiencing unstable housing when they were recruited.[ii] Vulnerable populations are also disproportionately impacted by the absence of accessible and affordable housing. In one study, 68% of child trafficking survivors reported they were homeless when they had been trafficked and engaged in commercial sex, including exchanging sex acts to meet basic needs such as housing.[iii] Foster youth aging out of the system are also at higher risk of homelessness and becoming trafficking victims.[iv] Additionally, LGBTQ youth experience homelessness at twice the rate of non-LGBTQ youth.[v] Evaluating the most effective methods to providing at-risk individuals with stable housing is critical to taking a proactive and preventative approach to human trafficking.

The TSHA is also crucial to establishing effective approaches for providing survivors with housing after they leave their exploitative situations. Between December 2007 and December 2017, 37% of referral and crisis assistance requests to the National Human Trafficking hotline were for housing needs.[vi] Additionally, 47% of crisis needs were emergency shelter requests, and 40% of survivors reported seeking shelter.[vii] Failure to access housing may also keep trafficking victims in their exploitative situations. In one study, 64% of survivors reported the absence of affordable housing was a barrier to leaving their trafficking situation.[viii]

For survivors searching for an apartment or house, almost every application requires a “credit check.” It is at this moment in a survivor’s life that the impact of these bills intersect. To provide survivors access to affordable housing and financially stable and independent future, there must be access to safe and stable housing and a fair credit check that is free from the impact that debt bondage had on the survivor consumer–reflecting the legitimate credit history of the survivor and not of their trafficker. To accomplish this, Congress must pass both of these critical protections for survivors.

Without bills like this, survivors will continue to be impacted by their prior exploitation and deemed not “credit worthy,” resulting in persisting economic inequity, homelessness, and barriers to financial stability. I call on Congress to take up these issues and ensure the NDAA proceeds to provide these necessary supports that survivors so greatly need to fully recover from their trafficking victimization.

Dr. Hatcher has worked as a civilian member of law enforcement at the Cook County Sheriffs’ Office for 15 years, a U.S. Representative of SPACE International (Survivors of Prostitution Calling for Enlightenment), a survivor organization representing 10 countries. She is a recipient of numerous awards including the 2014 Shared Hope International Path Breaker Award, the 2016 Presidential Lifetime Achievement Award from President Obama, and was honored on Congressional Record for Black History by U.S. Senator Richard Durbin of IL.

[i] Runaway homeless youth and unstable housing ranked second and fourth, respectively. Polaris, 2019 Data Report, Polaris Project, https://polarisproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/Polaris-2019-US-National-Human-Trafficking-Hotline-Data-Report.pdf (last visited June 11, 2021).

[ii] Polaris, Housing & Homelessness Systems, Polaris Project 16 (July 2018), https://polarisproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/A-Roadmap-for-Systems-and-Industries-to-Prevent-and-Disrupt-Human-Trafficking-Housing-and-Homelessness-Systems.pdf.

[iii] Laura T. Murphy, Labor and Sex Trafficking Among Homeless Youth, 6 (2016), https://www.covenanthouse.org/sites/default/files/inline-files/Loyola%20Multi-City%20Executive%20Summary%20FINAL.pdf.

[iv] Murphy, supra note 4, at 6.

[v] Chapin Hall, Missed Opportunities: LGBTQ Youth Homelessness in America, 7 (Apr. 2018) https://voicesofyouthcount.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/VoYC-LGBTQ-Brief-Chapin-Hall-2018.pdf.

[vi] Polaris, supra note 3, at 24.

[vii] Polaris, supra note 3, at 24.

[viii] Polaris, supra note 3, at 21.

November 1, 2021 by Guest

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 6^th, 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/

October 27, 2021 by Jo Lembo

How to be a Successful Ambassador of Hope: Event Reporting & Staying Connected

Ambassadors are an important influence in their communities to keep children safe, when they use Shared Hope presentations and resources.

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October 11, 2021 by Camryn Peterson

Advanced Legislative Framework: Issue Area #6

For the last several months, we have been reviewing the six Issue Areas that comprise the Advanced Legislative Framework—the rubric for issuing grades in our Report Cards on Child & Youth Sex Trafficking. This month, we are highlighting the final issue: Prevention and Training.

To eradicate sex trafficking, it is imperative that key individuals are trained to identify and respond to sex trafficking. Mandated training for those on the front lines of working with survivors and at-risk children is essential to promptly identifying and responding, or even preventing sex trafficking victimization. Preventing sex trafficking from the outset can also be accomplished by educating students themselves, giving them the tools to avoid trafficking exploitation.

Child welfare, juvenile justice agencies and law enforcement are some of the earliest interveners with victims of child and youth sex trafficking and often work with them both during and after leaving their trafficking situation. Ongoing, comprehensive training helps ensure these front line responders understand the complexities of trafficking and equips them to create an appropriate response within their community and statewide.

Prosecutors hold a unique position when working with victims of sex trafficking, therefore they should be trained on how to appropriate prosecute in a victim-centered manner, identifying the role of their exploitation in the crimes they committed. Further, prosecutors should be trained to work with victims in a trauma-informed manner through the judicial process, helping them feel comfortable while seeking justice against their exploiter.

Lastly, school personnel and students should receive training to not only identify exploitation in other students, but so students can recognize grooming tactics used against them. We know that many students are targeted by exploiters, but by empowering them through appropriate curricula, we can help them build resiliency and confidence by knowing how to react if they or someone they know is being targeted or exploited. Training school personnel also strengthens the efforts to protect children from exploitation by helping adults identify warning signs that students may be displaying and ensuring they know how to connect students with the care they need.

When key groups are trained on how to recognize and respond to sex trafficking, intervention happens sooner, and appropriate support is given to victims. This a crucial step in ending child and youth sex trafficking and helping those who have been exploited.

To learn more about Issue Area #6 and the other Issue Areas, read the Advanced Legislative Framework.

If you’d like to see the framework in action, sign up to receive your state’s grade when it’s released on November 17!

September 29, 2021 by Sarah Bendtsen

Wisconsin Senate Bill 245 Testimony

Shared Hope International has been working in Wisconsin, across the country, and internationally for over 20 years to guide and support appropriate responses to protect survivors, hold offenders to account, and ultimately prevent the crime entirely. 11 years ago we launched the Protected Innocence Challenge project (i.e. State Report Cards) to assess the status of state’s laws and to drive legislative progress. Since 2011, we have called on states to recognize any minor engaged in commercial sex as a victim of a sex trafficking, not a “prostitute” or “delinquent youth.” We know that survivors of child sex trafficking have the best outcomes when they are met with protection, trauma-informed services, and a response that is appropriate for the horrific experiences they have endured—such a response cannot be rooted in juvenile justice practices and systems.

Amending the prostitution statute to be inapplicable to minors recognizes that children never engage in commercial sex by choice; rather, a child does so out of coercion, force, fraud, fear, or survival. This is not consensual sex; money does not sanitize rape and treating the child as consensual actor not only misplaces criminality, it directly re-victimizes the child. Oftentimes, children entangled in a life that includes commercial sex carry years of trauma, generational vulnerabilities, and abuse on their backs. Other times, such children have trusted the wrong adult, been fed a false promise, or have fallen for an exploiter who later sold the child to someone all too willing to pay for the chance to rape him or her. Children with unsafe or unstable home environments may find the streets safer and, resultantly, sell their bodies in exchange for something to eat or someplace to sleep. These are not choices; children living in such circumstances deserve, at a minimum, specialized services and long-term care, not the traumatizing impact of an arrest, detention and prosecution, or juvenile records that carrying devastating collateral consequences far beyond childhood years.

In 2014, four years after releasing the first State Report Cards, we graded Wisconsin a “B” state for having a set of strong, comprehensive laws that address child sex trafficking; for the last 8 years, Wisconsin has consistently scored higher than the national average in developing robust policies and practices related to child sex trafficking. However, despite holding a position of leadership, the state has lagged seriously behind a majority of the country in designing and prioritizing protective responses for survivors. 31 states and D.C. have made clear that children engaged in commercial sex are victims of sex trafficking, no prostitution offenders. While Wisconsin state law clearly defines children who are bought and sold for sex as victims of sex trafficking, those same minors can be and are arrested and prosecuted for prostitution. SB 245 is not only critical for remedying this legal paradox; this legislation embraces a nationally-regarded promising practice for protecting children and preventing harm.

Concerns have previously been raised that, without the ability to arrest child sex trafficking victims, law enforcement are limited in their ability to keep vulnerable youth safe. We wholeheartedly share the desire to ensure survivor safety; however, arrest is not the only and certainly not the appropriate mechanism for doing so. Alternatively, many states that have enacted and successfully implemented Safe Harbor responses have abandoned the use of arrest and adopted more child-friendly and appropriate tools for taking children into custody, including the use of temporary protective custody provisions. Fortunately, Wisconsin has already developed this mechanism under Wis. Stat. § 48.19(d).

SB 245 not only aligns with promising and child-centered responses to sex trafficking but amplifies survivors’ calls for justice. Our decades of research and collaborative work with trafficking survivors has illuminated the harms of punitive responses to victims; survivors continue to reiterate the additional trauma and harm that is caused during arrest, detention, and prosecution, even if such responses are well-intended and designed break the cycle of exploitation, including

Wisconsin’s current diversion response to child sex trafficking victims. Conversely, responses outside of punitive systems are proven to be more effective, cost-efficient, and impactful in addressing survivors comprehensive needs and goals, and preventing the predictable cycle of vulnerabilities, exploitation, criminalization, and increased vulnerabilities to reexploitation.

We commend the Sponsor’s leadership on this issue and are grateful for the Committee’s interest in supporting an alternative, more survivor-centered and justice-oriented response.

If you live in Wisconsin, urge your legislators to support Senate Bill 245 and end the criminalization of children with prostitution.