The fourth pillar, Prosecute, of the Texas Human Trafficking Prevention Coordination Council's Strategic Plan focuses on prosecuting the traffickers and purchasers involved in human trafficking, which can come with many challenges.
Some of the most difficult challenges to this pillar come from victimization, because many victims won't self-identify, cooperate with law enforcement and may even fear law enforcement as a result of the nature of their victimization, the Strategic Plan states.
The Prosecute Pillar contains three strategies to help law enforcement and key stakeholders prosecute those responsible.
The first of the three strategies is to assign specially-trained units to handle human trafficking cases, the plan states. Assigning these specially-trained units will enhance efforts to prosecute those committing the crimes.
Often times human trafficking cases are very complex and take special knowledge to handle the cases, which makes these special units the best to handle the cases.
Encouraging prosecutors to charge criminals if human trafficking is suspected is the second strategy of the Prosecute Pillar, according to the plan.
Texas has one of the highest human trafficking numbers in the nation, but often the number of reported cases doesn't accurately represent the actual number in the state.
"When the number reported human trafficking cases is lower than the actual number of cases, it may give the appearance to community members that trafficking is not prevalent in their community," the Strategic Plan said. "Without accurate data on the number of human trafficking incidents, victims and offenders in the state, Texas cannot efficiently dedicate resources to anti-trafficking efforts."
This stresses the importance of having law enforcement units that are specially trained in human trafficking to be able to use investigation and observations to determine the difference between human trafficking cases and other violent-related cases.
The last strategy is to promote prosecution partnerships, the plan states. Due to the complexity of these types of cases, other agencies often help in the investigation of human trafficking cases.
Encouraging all types of agencies that work with human trafficking to collaborate with the investigation and prosecuting will improve investigations and empower those who work on the cases.
