Put Trafficking Victims First Act of 2019

Floor Speech

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Mrs. WAGNER. Mr. Speaker, I thank the ranking member very much for his voice on this issue and so many others, and I thank my dear friend from California, Karen Bass, for her leadership.

Mr. Speaker, I rise today to urge my colleagues to support the Put Trafficking Victims First Act, which I wrote and introduced in the last Congress with Congresswoman Karen Bass.

The bill passed unanimously in May of 2017, and I hope that the House will again stand with the victims of human trafficking. Too often, trafficking victims are overlooked and underserved.

In my home State of Missouri, I have met with many survivors and listened to their painful stories. They need help to rebuild their lives and that is exactly what this legislation will do.

America's courtrooms need to adopt victim-centered practices oriented towards justice and recovery. While victims technically have access to mandatory restitution in Federal courts, the sad reality is that according to one estimate, sex trafficking victims get restitution in only 14 percent of Federal sex trafficking cases. This is unacceptable, Mr. Speaker.

This legislation will direct the Attorney General to work on increasing restitution and to adopt victim-friendly procedures in criminal cases. We believe the trauma-informed care helps victims recover and cooperate with law enforcement so we may put pimps and buyers behind bars.

Lack of help for victims in the justice system can lead to revictimization, or even result in victims being criminalized for offenses that they were forced to commit.

The Putting Trafficking Victims First Act of 2019 encourages training for agencies, law enforcement, and prosecutors across the country to implement victim-centered approaches to investigating and preventing trafficking.

We also encourage law enforcement to make every attempt to determine whether an individual's participation in trafficking is free from force, fraud, and coercion before arresting or charging them.

The lack of good data on how to find and rescue victims of trafficking is another major challenge in the United States. We don't really know how best to identify and locate victims; what proportion are coming from foster care; or their ages; ethnicity; or other characteristics. We can't help victims if we can't find them, and we desperately need to improve victim outreach.

The Putting Trafficking Victims First Act of 2019 establishes a national working group to develop a public survey of survivors and robust methodologies to estimate the prevalence of trafficking. This will help us understand how and where victims are accessing help to improve service provision.

Finally, victims of trafficking are mostly served at the State level. So it is critical that States improve how they respond to victims. We need to make sure that all child trafficking victims receive the same level of care that any other child abuse survivor would receive. The bill encourages States to improve outreach, screen children entering child welfare services and the justice system, screen foreign nationals who will be labor trafficked, create safe harbor laws, and develop emergency response plans.

Together, we can get victims of trafficking out of dangerous and abusive situations and make trauma-informed services more accessible.

Mr. Speaker, I urge my colleagues to put trafficking victims first and join Congresswoman Bass and myself in voting for this legislation.

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