Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act of 2017

Floor Speech

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Ms. MURKOWSKI. Mr. President, I am pleased to be on the floor this morning to thank and to support my colleagues, Senator Portman and Senator Nelson, who have led the effort here before us, an effort that would end sex trafficking over the internet or certainly work to reduce it.

As we think about the scourge that is brought upon our children through a means and a way--we like to think of the internet as a powerful tool, but to know that it can be a powerful tool that truly is devastating to our children and devastating to our families calls for action. So I am pleased to be able to join my colleagues today in urging passage of the sex trafficking bill that we have before the Senate.

I think we all know there are many, many reasons why we need to deter the use of internet resources by predators. The wisdom of this is pretty apparent on its face. This legislation is for the protection of our children--the most vulnerable among us.

I have an additional reason for urging the adoption of this legislation, and that is the protection of Native women and girls from predators. I have been talking about the trafficking of Native women and girls for as long as I have been here in the Senate--now some 15 years. At first, the evidence was perhaps anecdotal. FBI agents who were familiar with trafficking patterns would come to us, and they would say that Alaska Native women were a highly desirable commodity. Even using that terminology is just so offensive, but that is how they were viewed--as a desirable commodity for sex trafficking because they could be trafficked either as White women or as Asian women.

There is a body of evidence that when many Alaska Native women or girls left their villages to go into town or to go to the city, they would literally be stalked by predators waiting to recruit them. We certainly see a prevalence of sex trafficking in Covenant House, which is our youth homeless shelter. We have reports that one in four homeless youth in Anchorage are victims of sex trafficking, and 42 percent of them are Alaska Natives.

As I have been here in the Senate over these years, the way these women and girls have been recruited, have been trafficked, has changed. No longer do you have the predators who are lurking, hanging out on the street corners, but it is the internet. Again, it is this powerful tool that is available to do so much good that is now being used for a predatory purpose. While we don't have the internet coverage in Alaska that you have in the big cities of the lower 48, the internet is used to recruit girls for sex trafficking all over, and I certainly had that confirmed in my last visit when I met with the FBI agents in charge in Anchorage.

It wasn't too many weeks ago that the Senator from North Dakota, Ms. Heitkamp, and I came to the floor to talk about the urgency of addressing the growing number of missing and murdered Native women in America. Senator Heitkamp characterizes the problem as epidemic, and I agree with her. I do think it is an epidemic. Native women are victims of violence in unprecedented proportions. Not all of these victims are trafficked, but some are trafficked, and then they go missing. When their services are no longer needed or they find themselves controlled by a particularly violent predator, they never become ``unmissing'' until their bodies may be coincidently found, at which point they are finally regarded as murdered, gone.

I say today that there is an urgency to keep Native women and girls away from predators. While turning off the internet on-ramp to recruitment may not completely solve the problem, it is a worthy effort in its own right. It is one tool that we need to ratchet back.

We hear from the sponsor of this bill and from so many that enough is enough. It is no longer tolerable. It is time we attack the problem of sex trafficking at the source, and that means doing all we can to make the internet a very inhospitable place for sex traffickers and those who enable the immoral and disgusting trade of our fellow human beings.

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