Inside the U. Both crimes are hard to track, but experts say measuring the scope of labor trafficking is especially difficult because sex trafficking cases typically get more attention from law enforcement, federal prosecutors and the media. While federal human trafficking convictions increased by about 70 percent between and , the U. Advisory Council on Human Trafficking has noted that sex trafficking investigations have received greater focus.
In , for example, the Justice Department prosecuted federal trafficking cases — only 13 of which primarily involved labor. Experts and advocates alike describe a self-perpetuating cycle, wherein agencies may not direct resources toward labor trafficking because the issue is rarely the focus of media attention. Prosecutors may be swayed by greater public sympathy for victims of sex trafficking, they say, than for labor trafficking victims. They say that undocumented victims fear reporting abuse and that law enforcement officials are often unfamiliar with how to investigate labor trafficking cases, which can be harder to prove than cases involving sex trafficking.
Many victims are immigrants, he said, both with and without legal status, and are trapped in situations where traffickers have taken away their passports, threatened to call federal immigration enforcement or have forced them into debt. In , for example, federal and local law enforcement raided a trailer park in Marion, Ohio and found at least 10 trafficking victims, including eight minors. In an interview for the FRONTLINE documentary Trafficked in America , a former Trillium worker who says he worked with the teens said they would receive death threats for complaining about the amount of money being taken from their pay to settle debts with their traffickers.
A federal investigation is ongoing. T rillium has not been charged with wrongdoing and has denied any knowledge of trafficked teens working at their plants.
According to Martina Vandenberg, the president of The Human Trafficking Pro Bono Legal Center, the number of federal civil labor trafficking cases has far outnumbered civil sex trafficking cases, illustrating that more cases exist than those criminal prosecutors are willing to address. In the past 10 years, she said, there have been civil labor trafficking cases compared to 20 civil sex trafficking cases.
