LITTLE ROCK — Arkansas’ 7-year-old human-trafficking law is weak and no one has ever been prosecuted under it, an assistant attorney general and several anti-trafficking groups said Tuesday.
The remarks were made at the beginning of a twoday human-traff icking meeting designed to find ways to toughen Arkansas’ law and build a coalition against trafficking.
The meeting continues today at First Baptist Church at 62 Pleasant Valley Drive in Little Rock with a day-long workshop on how advocacy groups can work together.
No one has been charged under the state’s trafficking law, Arkansas Code Annotated 5-11-108, since it went into effect in 2005, assistant Attorney General Bart Dickinson said.
“We don’t want a law on the books for seven years that has not been used,” he said.
Human trafficking is a Class A felony. The code defines trafficking as recruiting, harboring or obtaining a person for labor through the use of force, fraud or coercion for the purpose of involuntary servitude, peonage, debt bondage, slavery, marriage, adoption or sexual conduct.
A Class A felony is punishable by up to 30 years in prison and up to $15,000 in fines.
The Administrative Office of the Courts confirmed that no one has been charged under the statute since it was enacted in January 2005.
The penalties for rape or kidnapping are often more severe so prosecutors charge people with those crimes instead, Dickinson said.
Sen. Joyce Elliott, DLittle Rock, who wrote the 2005 legislation, agreed the state law needs to be strengthened.
“I knew at the time that there needed to be a follow-up,” Elliott said. “That was the initial foray. I had a difficult time getting people to even pay attention to the issue because they didn’tthink it was relevant.”
She intends to revisit the issue during the 2013 session, she said, and noted that she wasn’t consulted about the meeting.
Two of the national advocacy groups attending the meeting rank Arkansas’ law as poor compared with other states.
Shared Hope International, a Vancouver, Wash.-based advocacy and research group, gave Arkansas’ law a grade of “F” in its 2011 report card, specifically for failing to financially punish those involved and for requiring proof that a minor was forced to be involved.
“Why are we still holding a child accountable for a crime they were forced to commit?” the group’s senior policy director, Samantha Vardaman, said. “Sex trafficking is not prostitution.”
Arkansas was one of 26 states to receive a failing grade.
The states around Arkansas all received higher rankings: “B” for Missouri and Texas, “C” for Louisiana and Tennessee, and “D” for Mississippi and Oklahoma, according to the report.
“Arkansas is threatened by its neighbor’s strong legal frameworks in the sense that crime will migrate,” Vardaman said.
A Washington, D.C.-based group, the Polaris Project, runs the National Human Trafficking Resource Center and hot line.
Arkansas’ law is not in line with federal laws or the surrounding states, said James Dold, policy director at the Polaris Project.
“It is very, very important that the Legislature takes a strong look at the current laws. They are particularly outdated,” Dold said.
His group considers Arkansas one of nine states whose trafficking laws lag the rest of the country, Dold said. The others are Alaska, Colorado, Massachusetts, Montana, South Carolina, South Dakota, West Virginia and Wyoming.
The National Human Trafficking Resource Center website lists 160 calls to its hot line made from Arkansas since Dec. 7, 2007. The information can be found online at www.polarisproject.org.
Nearly 100 of those calls were placed since National Human Trafficking Prevention Day in January.
Dold attributed the 63 percent increase in calls in the last six months to increased awareness of the hot line. A similar increase happened in other states, he said.
A 2011 report from the resource center showed the highest number of Arkansas calls came from Blytheville and Little Rock. The hot line also got calls from small towns such as Reyno, which is north of Pocahontas, and Hermitage, which is south of Warren.
The Senate Committee on Children and Youth and several House members met Tuesday to hear about Arkansas’ current law and to begin looking at legislation proposed by Rep. David Meeks, R-Conway.
The legislation is a model from Polaris. Meeks, who has advocated for more awareness of human trafficking for months, said it will likely have to be adapted to fit Arkansas.
It includes granting victims of human trafficking immunity from prosecution, creation of a trafficking prevention task force, training for law enforcement, requiring the posting of the phone number for the national human trafficking hot line in certain public areas such as schools, strip clubs or highway rest stops, and restitution for victims.
Beyond changing the law, Dickinson said, prosecutors and law enforcement need to change how they approach victims of sexual abuse. For instance, if a police officer catches a teenager selling sex, they should ask whether he is being forced to do so against his will, Dickinson said.
Growing discussion about trafficking is increasing awareness, said Sen. Jason Rapert, R-Bigelow.
“Arkansas, I think, has been just woefully uninformed about this,” he said. “I guess I’m naive to some things, but I can tell you, now that I am aware, this is very, very disturbing.”
Arkansas groups attending the meeting are the PATH Initiative, which stands for Partners Against Trafficking Humans, Not For Sale, Truckers Against Trafficking, Rush Hour Traffic, Safe Places andCatholic Charities.
Senate Committee Chairman Missy Irvin, R-Mountain View, expressed amazement at the pervasiveness of human trafficking.
“It’s not just foreign nationals that this is happening to,” Irvin said. “It’s happening to the blonde-haired, blue-eyed girl who lives in the neighborhood next to you.”
Northwest Arkansas, Pages 11 on 06/27/2012