WASHINGTON — Local vice cops, who for decades have led the law-enforcement crackdown on prostitution, could soon have an unwilling partner: FBI agents.
The Justice Department is fighting legislation that would expand federal law to cover prostitution cases, saying that it would divert agents from more serious crimes. Although local police still would handle the vast majority of cases, Justice officials said the law’s passage would force them to send agents to investigate pimps and bring cases in federal courts as well.
Some anti-trafficking activists and members of Congress think prostitution should be a federal crime.
The new provision is part of a bill reauthorizing the federal human trafficking statute, which passed Congress in 2000 and helped trigger a worldwide war on what many consider modern-day slavery. The House Foreign Affairs committee this month approved the legislation, which has bipartisan support and is expected to be taken up by the full House next week. Its prospects in the Senate are unclear.
The battle against trafficking is a major priority for the Bush administration, which is attacking the problem with 10 federal agencies reporting to a Cabinet-level task force led by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. But there has been heated debate — even among the dozens of organizations fighting trafficking in the United States — over whether prostitutes should be considered trafficking victims.
Federal officials define trafficking as holding someone in a workplace through force, fraud or coercion, elements that are required to prove a trafficking case under federal law. Trafficking generally takes two forms, forced sex or labor. But some activists argue that all prostitutes, even those not forced to sell sex, should be defined as trafficking victims and their pimps subject to federal prosecution.
The debate over the bill comes amid broader questions over how many victims are trafficked into the United States. The government estimated in 1999 that 50,000 slaves were arriving in the country every year. That estimate was revised downward in 2004 to 14,500 to 17,500 a year. Yet since 2000, and despite 42 Justice Department task forces and more than $150 million in federal dollars to find them, a total of about 1,400 people have been certified as human trafficking victims in this country, a tiny fraction of the original estimates. Some activists believe that if all prostitutes were considered victims, the numbers would rise into the predicted hundreds of thousands.
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