There are more than 300,000 victims of human trafficking in Texas of whom nearly 79,000 are minors and youth victims of sex trafficking, according to a 2016 University of Texas at Austin Institute on Domestic Violence and Sexual Assault (IDVSA) study.
About 234,000 are adult victims of labor trafficking.
“We estimate the number of workers in Texas in industries known to be vulnerable to human trafficking, such as migrant farmworkers, cleaning services workers, construction workers, kitchen workers in restaurants, landscaping and groundskeeping workers,” IDVSA Co-Director Bruce Kellison said. “Other labor-sector examples of hard-to-estimate populations would include domestic work, begging rings, and massage parlors.”
The study further found that although minor and youth sex trafficking costs the state of Texas approximately $6.6 billion annually, traffickers exploit approximately $600 million from victims of labor trafficking in the state.
“Both sets of victims are difficult to identify,” Kellison told the Lone Star Standard. “Victims have strong disincentives to seek help in both sex and labor trafficking. It is fair to say that sex trafficking is often mistakenly mischaracterized as a problem that happens to the girl next door, making all children vulnerable to exploitation equally when the research clearly shows they are not equally vulnerable.”
Undocumented immigrants, however, are not any more likely to be sex trafficking victims than legal residents.
“To the extent that undocumented workers are employed at disproportionately higher rates than documented workers in industries vulnerable to exploitation and trafficking, however, it might be true that they are at higher risk for trafficking exploitation,” Dr. Matt Kammer-Kerwick of the IC2 Institute told Lone Star Standard.
Drug addiction and participation in the foster care system are risk factors for child sex trafficking, according to the study.
“Labor trafficking victims are often at society’s margins, working in low-wage jobs,” Kammer-Kerwick added. “Also, both sets of victims pass in and out of states of exploitation without themselves recognizing that they are victims.”
Regarding remedies, Kellison said labor trafficking victims have the same recourse to the legal system as do other crime victims.
“Many areas of the state have anti-trafficking task forces that bring together social services agencies, victim advocates, police and prosecutors to coordinate better services for victims and more prosecutions of traffickers,” Kellison said. “The task forces are set up in a way that mimics the way that Sexual Assault Response Teams (SARTs) function in Texas.”
In addition, Texas last year passed HB 3800 to create a statewide reporting requirement that could make identifying victims and prosecuting trafficking cases easier.
“We have detailed some challenges to researching human trafficking, such as severely limited access to law enforcement data, victims continuing to slip through the cracks because identification is such a difficult issue to tackle, and the inability of professionals to quantify costs to provide care to victims and survivors of human trafficking,” Kellison said. “These challenges, among others, are not unique to Texas and will continue to guide our research activities. A key component of this work is to identify gaps and work toward better understanding of how to fill those gaps with knowledge and understanding.”
