U.S. Attorneys General, Meeting in San Antonio, Target Human Trafficking
Now the second most profitable crime worldwide

woai.com
by Jim Forsyth
Wednesday, November 30, 2011

Attorneys General from all fifty states have gathered in San Antonio for the annual convention of the National Association of Attorneys General, and officials tell 1200 WOAI's Michael Board that strategies to fight human trafficking are on the top of the agenda.

One proposal, being floated by Washington State Attorney General Rob McKenna is to stop dancing around the issue of modern day slavery, and call it what it is.

"This is not prostitution, this is not illegal immigration, these are people who have been brought in against their will or under false pretenses," McKenna says.

Human trafficking has replaced drug dealing as the number two crime in terms of profits worldwide, behind only trafficking in illegal weapons.

"Think about it, you can sell a gun one time, you can sell some drugs one time, you can sell a person ten to twelve times a day," Texas State Sen. Leticia Van de Putte said.

McKenna and other attorneys general say between 100,000 and 300,000 new victims of human trafficking are moved through the U.S. each year. The average victim of human trafficking is a pre teen girl who is sold either into domestic slavery or into the sex trade.

McKenna says Americans are just now wising up to the depth and severity of the problem. He says the awareness of human trafficking is about at the point where awareness of domestic violence was forty years ago.

"Law enforcement would respond to what we now know as domestic violence cases, and they would treat it a simple domestic disturbance, and file no charges because both people were considered equally guilty," McKenna said. "There was never any follow through and there were no services for domestic violence victims."

He says we have come a long way in dealing with domestic violence to the point where everybody is aware of the problem, society itself is fighting back against it, and people who commit the crime are not only prosecuted, they are marginalized and shunned by the greater community. The attorneys general will try to make that happen with human trafficking.

"We don't even have a good fix today on how many domestic human trafficking victims there are in the United States today," he said.

McKenna says the Texas crackdown on prostitution during last February's Super Bowl in Dallas is an indication that state officials, like Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott, are beginning to shine a light on the problem.

Read more: http://radio.woai.com/cc-common/news/se ... z1fFOqJux1