Alabama's New Sex Trafficking Law Could Mean Life in Prison for Trafficking Victims

It's the war on drugs all over again, folks...

A new law in Alabama showcases how the war on sex trafficking is mirroring the war on drugs, with all of the negative consequences that implies. The law, signed by Republican Gov. Kay Ivey in mid-April, is called "The Sound of Freedom Act," after a recent hit movie about sex trafficking.

It's never a good sign when public policy takes its cues from Hollywood. It's even worse when the film in question was inspired by a group (Operation Underground Railroad) that stages highly-questionable "sting" operations and was founded by a truth-challenged man (Tim Ballard) fending off multiple sexual assault lawsuits.

Alabama's law—which takes effect on October 1, 2024—stipulates a mandatory life sentence for anyone found guilty of first-degree human trafficking of a minor. On its surface, this might not sound too objectionable. But in fact it will likely to lead to extreme overpunishment for people whose offenses are far less nefarious than those in movies like The Sound of Freedom.

It could even lead to life in prison for trafficking victims.

How Human Trafficking Laws Really Work 

If you're a regular reader, you probably know by now that "human trafficking" in America looks nothing like it does in the movies. Something needn't involve force, abduction, or border crossings to be legally defined as human trafficking. Adult victims often start off doing sex work consensually, then wind up being exploited, threatened, or abused by someone they initially trusted to help them. And when someone under age 18 is involved in any exchange of sexual activity for something of value, it qualifies as sex trafficking even if no trafficker is involved.

Two 17-year-old runaways could work together, meeting up with prostitution customers. They would both be considered trafficking victims under U.S. law. If one of them turned 18 and they continued to work together, the 18-year-old would be guilty of child sex trafficking. Helping them post an ad online or driving them to meet a customer would also suffice.

A teenage victim need not even be a legal adult to be labeled a sex trafficker. Take the case of Hope Zeferjohn, in Kansas. Starting at age 15, she was victimized by an older boyfriend, who pressured her into prostitution and asked her to try to recruit other teens to work for him too. Zeferjohn wound up convicted of child sex trafficking for these attempts.

And people need not know they're involved with a minor to be guilty of child sex trafficking. A 17-year-old could post an ad online, pretend to be 19, and meet up with someone (perhaps barely over 18 himself) looking to pay another adult for sex. The person paying would be guilty of human trafficking in the first degree even if he had no reason to believe the person he paid was a minor. In fact, Alabama law specifically states that "it is not required that the defendant have knowledge of a minor victim's age, nor is reasonable mistake of age a defense to liability under this section."

There doesn't even need to be a real victim involved for someone to be convicted of human trafficking of a minor. Police could pretend to be an adult sex worker, chat with a prospective customer, and then casually drop into the conversation that they're "really" only 17-years-old. The prospective customer may believe this to be actually true or not (after all, the actual police decoy may be and look like a young adult). But for purposes of the law, it doesn't matter what the person believed or that there was no actual minor involved.

None of these scenarios resemble the sort of sex trafficking situations imagined by Hollywood or by groups like Operation Underground Railroad. That doesn't mean everyone involved is totally blameless. But…

Existing Laws Provide Plenty Harsh Penalties 

Whatever culpability should accrue to individuals in the above situations, I think most people would agree that life in prison would be too harsh. But under Alabama's new Sound of Freedom law, a life sentence would be possible in all cases and mandatory in cases where the offender was at least 19 years old.

This is insane—and especially so when you consider the existing punishments available.

Human trafficking in the first degree is a Class A felony in Alabama. Class A felonies already come with a mandatory minimum sentence of 10 years imprisonment, and a life sentence or up to 99 years in prison is possible.

Under existing law, then, it's not as if people guilty of truly heinous acts will get off easy (even if additional charges, such as abduction or assault, are not added on).

Someone guilty of Hollywood-style sex trafficking could still be sentenced to life in prison. Someone guilty of less heinous but still serious crimes could be sentenced to decades in prison. But an 19-year-old who takes a 17-year-old friend along to meet a customer would be subject to only 10 years in prison—still too much, if you ask me, but at least not life in prison regardless of circumstances.

Following Drug War Trends 

What we're seeing in Alabama is a perfect example of how the war on sex trafficking mirrors the war on drugs.

At a certain point in the drug war, everything was plenty criminalized but (surprise, surprise) people were still doing and selling drugs. And politicians still wanted ways to look like they were doing something about it.

An honest broker might say: Look, the laws we have are already quite tough, but the truth is that no amount of criminalization will ever eradicate drugs entirely. Instead of throwing more law enforcement at the problem, maybe we should look at ways to help people struggling with addiction. But no one in power wanted to appear soft on drugs.

So instead of dealing in reality, they proposed harsher and harsher penalties for drug offenses. First mandatory minimums. Then even harsher mandatory minimums, along with sentencing enhancements for various circumstances (like being in a certain proximity to a school, even if no minors are involved) and three-strikes laws (which automatically impose a harsher sentence on people if they've been convicted of certain previous crimes, even when the prior offenses are unrelated to the third offense). This is a large part of how America ended up with a devastating mass incarceration problem.

Over the past two decades, we've been seeing this same pattern play out with prostitution-related offenses—including ones where the sexual activity involves consenting adults, rather than force, fraud, coercion, or minors. We've seen the introduction of harsher and harsher penalties, mandatory minimums, and now Alabama's mandatory life sentences. And we've seen this at the same time that authorities keep expanding the categories of activities that count as sex trafficking, from activities directly and knowingly connected to the core crime to activities only tangentially or unwittingly involved.

In this way, actual problems are blown up into moral panics, after which any measure of proportion is thrown out and any effort to deal with root causes or victim services falls way behind efforts to mete out harsher and harsher punishments to as many people as possible.

We didn't arrest and imprison our way out of drug addiction. And we're not going to arrest and imprison our way out of sexual abuse and exploitation, or out of young people in desperate circumstances turning to sex work to get by. But approaches like opening up more shelters don't get the same headlines as flashy legislation named after popular sex-crime melodramas.

More Sex & Tech News

• NetChoice is suing over an Ohio law requiring young people get parental consent to be on social media. Meanwhile, in Tennessee, the governor just signed a similar bill into law.

• A new law in Georgia "allows the Georgia Board of Massage Therapy to initiate inspections of massage therapy businesses and board recognized massage therapy educational programs without notice," per Gov. Brian Kemp's office. Laws like these are often justified by invoking speculation about sex trafficking; in practice, they get used to bust a bunch of immigrant women for giving massages without a license.

• Meta is starting to test age verification in the U.S. for Facebook Dating.

• "It is perhaps inevitable that taking sexual misconduct seriously, as with any other social ill, would open the door for opportunistic people to use that effort to get what they want," writes Freddie DeBoer in a rant about the incoherence of many progressive attitudes toward sex right now.

Today's Image

Gemini dreams of sunshine on this rainy Monday. (ENB/Reason)