Saturday, August 07, 2010
Janice Shaw Crouse, a former speechwriter for George H. W. Bush and now political commentator for the Concerned Women for America Legislative Action Committee, is not happy with the latest Trafficking in Persons (TIP) Report, issued by the State Department.
Crouse takes exception with the State Department’s decision to lump sex trafficking and labor trafficking together. She writes that this change is significant because it “conflates the two types of trafficking, and the phrase is used by those who see prostitution as ‘sex work.’ Instead of focusing on commercial sexual exploitation, the term links the two forms of human trafficking as ‘forms of employment’, requiring proof by the employer that force, fraud, or coercion was not used in the ‘hiring.’”
Crouse says the 10th anniversary edition of the TIP report “signals a shift of focus” by the current administration on the problem of human trafficking. For starters, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton writes in her introductory remarks that the U.S. is more interested in being a “partner” rather than a leader in confronting the “global scourge.”
The report also references the U.N.-generated Palermo Protocol (2000), instead of the Trafficking Victims Protection Act that Congress approved in the same year. This represents a “shift away from U.S. law to an international United Nations ‘law.’”
Finally, the report seems to downplay the importance of requiring the TIP office “to coordinate anti-trafficking efforts across the Federal agencies, thus ensuring compliance with the legislation’s provisions, including a new model law for states that would make all acts of pandering and pimping per se crimes regardless of whether or not there is proof of fraud, force, or coercion and whether or not the victim is a minor.”
-Noel Brinkerhoff
The Administration Picks Weak Path to Fight Sex Trade (by Janice Shaw Crouse, Weekly Standard)
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