Human Trafficking in Hotels: New York Lawmaker Teams Up With Advocate

The first time Anneke Lucas heard about legislation designed to rescue human trafficking victims in hotels, she couldn't help but think about how something like that could have helped her as a child.

"If I had seen the definition that said I was not a prostitute, that would have made a difference for me," Lucas told NBC News. "I was the kind of child that wanted to get help but there was none."

A pioneering Connecticut law aims to put signs explaining who a victim might be along with the phone number for the National Human Trafficking Resource Center hotline in every hotel lobby in the state.

Read more from NBC News

New Orleans Human Trafficking Victims Says Backpage Website A Major Factor In New Orleans Human Trafficking

Just over half of the New Orleans human trafficking victims seeking help at Covenant House over the past six months were featured in prostitution ads on the website Backpage, whose CEO was arrested on pimping charges Thursday (Oct. 6), a Covenant House official says.


And of those 16 human trafficking victims, 11 worked in New Orleans strip clubs, said Shari Lockridge, a case worker at Covenant House. Some of them were recruited through the strip clubs and then began exchanging money for sex, often at the behest of a pimp who would maintain the ads and coordinate the flow of customers to the woman.

The Times Picayune has more

Sex Trafficking Victims May Push Rescue Away, U.S. Experts Say

by Ellen Wulfhorst | @EJWulfhorst | Thomson Reuters Foundation

Wednesday, 22 June 2016 15:28 GMT

 

BILLINGS, Montana, June 21 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - Rick and Pat Freeland have cared for hundreds of troubled girls and women at their log cabin refuge deep in the Rocky Mountains, but there's one rule; they will only take two victims of sex trafficking at a time.

Survivors of sex trafficking can be among the most difficult crime victims to assist, often resisting help, refusing to see themselves as victims and returning to their traffickers, experts say.

Added to that, they can be smart, manipulative and deceptive, using the same behaviours they learned to survive on anyone who tries to help them.

Read more here