This week, I have chosen a topic that is not often considered as a meaningful threat to our criminal justice system. The article, which I chose to base this post on comes from the University of Memphis Law Review and is titled “Prosecuting demand as a crime of human trafficking; The eighth circuit decision in United States v. Jungers.” The article was written by Samantha Vardaman and Christine Raino. The basis of the article surrounds the growing trend within the United States of human sex trafficking and how there has been a lack of prosecution amongst these cases. Vardaman and Reno (2013) call human sex trafficking a modern day form of slavery. More specifically, the article addresses the unfortunate trends of sex trafficking amongst our
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The ones who have been abused and/or neglected from the one’s that claimed to love them. It was not until 2014 when the Preventing Sex Trafficking and Strengthening Families Act was passed. The purpose of this act was to have state agencies, such as the Tennessee Department of Children’s Services to identify and provide services to victims and those at risk of becoming victims. By requiring state agencies to begin keeping statistics on these cases, it was only then that we truly saw how much of a trend this was becoming. Vardaman and Raino did an excellent job in pointing out how easy it is to access potential victims. One may ask themselves how can this be true as children’s information is confidential? This is true but the point the authors made was that all state agencies are publicized and easy to locate, especially through social media. Potential victims are located at these residential and group homes. These facilities are easily found in a phonebook and through online search engines. The article further suggests the need to make these group homes and other providers marked private so that potential perpetrators would not know their exact location. Think about it, for instance, in a heavy tourist area such as Gatlinburg, there is large residential group home, right in the middle of the city. This is prime real estate for a sex trafficking operation. The article concluded with the emphasis on how important it is to have a consensus on both State and Federal levels in how these types of cases are handled and prosecuted in the court of law. If law enforcement and the courts present a united front and demonstrate that there are and will be harsh penalties for trafficking our youth, the hope is to prevent future
The ones who have been abused and/or neglected from the one’s that claimed to love them. It was not until 2014 when the Preventing Sex Trafficking and Strengthening Families Act was passed. The purpose of this act was to have state agencies, such as the Tennessee Department of Children’s Services to identify and provide services to victims and those at risk of becoming victims. By requiring state agencies to begin keeping statistics on these cases, it was only then that we truly saw how much of a trend this was becoming. Vardaman and Raino did an excellent job in pointing out how easy it is to access potential victims. One may ask themselves how can this be true as children’s information is confidential? This is true but the point the authors made was that all state agencies are publicized and easy to locate, especially through social media. Potential victims are located at these residential and group homes. These facilities are easily found in a phonebook and through online search engines. The article further suggests the need to make these group homes and other providers marked private so that potential perpetrators would not know their exact location. Think about it, for instance, in a heavy tourist area such as Gatlinburg, there is large residential group home, right in the middle of the city. This is prime real estate for a sex trafficking operation. The article concluded with the emphasis on how important it is to have a consensus on both State and Federal levels in how these types of cases are handled and prosecuted in the court of law. If law enforcement and the courts present a united front and demonstrate that there are and will be harsh penalties for trafficking our youth, the hope is to prevent future