From the New York Times:
By Joseph Berger
Despite a highly trumpeted New York State law in 2007 that enacted tough penalties for sex or labor trafficking, very few people have been prosecuted since it went into effect, according to state statistics.
In New York State, there have been 18 arrests and one conviction for trafficking since the law was signed by Gov. Eliot Spitzer and took effect in November 2007, according to the New York State Division of Criminal Justice Services. There is one case pending in Manhattan, one in Queens and two in the Bronx.
The situation is not very different in New Jersey or roughly 30 other states with laws against human trafficking — defined as using fraud or force to exploit a person for sex or labor. A federal law passed in 2000 with life prison penalties has resulted in 196 cases with convictions against 419 people, according to the United States Department of Justice.
The scale of those numbers contrasts starkly with the 14,500 to 17,500 people the State Department estimates are brought into the United States each year for forced labor or sex.
Read the full article
Could the reaosn for this possibly be thatb there simply AREN'T as many trafiicking victims as political activists say there are?
ReplyDeleteAt one point, the State Department said there were over 100,000. Now it's 17,000. Both of those numbers are simply made up out of flat old nothing at all.