Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act
The Challenge:
27 million people are enslaved around the world today. Human trafficking and modern day slavery is the third largest criminal industry in the world and the fastest growing among all international crimes. Modern day slavery has a devastating effect on each victim, causing physical and emotional abuse, threats against their families and even death. But the impact of modern day slavery goes beyond individual victims; it undermines the health, safety and security of all nations it touches.
The Trafficking Victims Protection Act of 2000 (TVPA) represents the first major comprehensive US effort to address the global scourge of human trafficking. While this law was an important first step, after seven years of implementation, organizations working on the ground identified significant gaps that needed to be addressed in a reauthorization in order to vastly improve the underlying law. Funded and supported by Humanity United, our project sought to dramatically increase US efforts to combat modern day slavery and human trafficking.
The Process:
The Sheridan Group implemented the following steps to address this challenge:
- Identified and recruited key coalition members to launch coalition of trafficking and modern day slavery NGO leaders and experts.
- Trained and built coalition member advocacy capacity around legislative and appropriations processes.
- Formed and executed government relations strategy, which included drafting policy language for 22 recommendations for the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act.
- Leveraged the coalition’s collective assets, built political capital and interfaced with congressional and Administrative staff and officials at critical junctures throughout the legislative process to move the bill and actively mitigate obstacles as they arose.
The Result:
President Bush signed the William Wilberforce Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act of 2008 into law on December 23rd, 2008. The final bill that became law included 20 ½ of 22 Action Group recommendations. These provisions strengthened the Trafficking Victims Protection Act by extending greater protections to human trafficking victims in the US and abroad and providing US officials with additional tools to help ensure that traffickers are brought to justice.
A few of the important Action Group recommendations that are in the final bill include: a new program to provide case management services for US citizen victims of trafficking who need help obtaining such assistance as trauma counseling and shelter as well as counting these victims in the annual Attorney General report; the creation of an integrated database to be managed by the Human Smuggling and Trafficking Center, which will combine all data collected by each Federal department and agency represented on the Interagency Task Force to Monitor and Combat Trafficking; and a provision that will hold labor recruiters accountable if they knowingly recruit foreign laborers to work in the United States under forced labor conditions.
