Legislature to consider a bill based on Texas' sex crimes law
SAN ANTONIO EXPRESS-NEWS
Nov. 22, 2010, 12:24AM
Texas is one of the country's hubs for human trafficking, and proposed legislation would increase penalties for the crime and make it easier to investigate and prosecute.
A bill filed by Sen. Leticia Van de Putte, D-San Antonio, would make a 2009 law against human trafficking more like the state's sex crime laws. The proposed law would require convicted traffickers to serve at least half their sentence before being eligible for parole and it would increase the minimum for repeat offenders to 25 years in prison. It also gives police officers new tools for investigating human trafficking.
One of the most important new tools, Van de Putte said, is a change in the law that would allow law enforcement to detain child victims, allowing police to seek help for the victims and continue their investigation.
"It's modern day slavery," Van de Putte said. "And the big emphasis is right now if you rescue a teenager and they're a runaway, you can't just send them back" to the home they ran away from.
I-10 a main route
According to a report Attorney General Greg Abbott submitted to the Legislature in 2009, almost 20 percent of the 800,000 trafficking victims in the U.S. travel through Texas, usually on the Interstate 10 corridor.
The state's biggest human trafficking centers are Houston and El Paso, according to the report.
Human trafficking is not human smuggling. Trafficking refers to someone being coerced into performing labor, sexual or otherwise. Trafficking victims tend to be immigrants who were lured into the country under false promises of employment, said Chris Burchell, president of the advocacy group Texas Anti-Trafficking in Persons.
U.S. citizens or residents, often children who have been introduced to drugs, can also end up as trafficking victims, Burchell said.
"Kids that run away are being exposed to these elements, being forced into prostitution, being forced into a lot of bad situations," Burchell said.
Speaking last week in Arlington at a meeting of the Texas Human Trafficking Prevention Task Force, Abbott rattled off a list of recent trafficking cases in the state.
In one case, a family smuggled into El Paso was forced to work essentially as slaves, cooking and cleaning traffickers' safe house.
In a case recently wrapped up in Houston, a man was sentenced to 33 years in prison for taking a 16-year-old girl into Louisiana and prostituting her. In another case involving a 16-year-old girl, the trafficker broke his victim's nose before forcing her to have sex for money.
Relentless criminals
"Human traffickers are relentless," Abbott said. "They are undeterred and they are growing in size and number. We must match their effort by being equally relentless and equally undeterred."
The proposed legislation is the result of preliminary findings from the Texas Human Trafficking Prevention Task Force. When the task force presents its full findings next month, the bill will be amended to meet those recommendations, Van de Putte said.
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