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Human trafficking bill heads through Legislature
A bill steadily moving through the Florida Legislature could make it easier to prosecute human trafficking crimes.
The issue is an important one for Rep. Matt Gaetz, a co-sponsor of the bill, who said human trafficking is a big problem in Northwest Florida, particularly in the tourism industry.
“It’s happening right under our noses and many people are not aware of it,” he said.
Gaetz said constituents have told him frightening stories of people, many of them young women, from Eastern Europe and Asia who have been coerced to come to the United States to work service jobs and then are defrauded of their wages.
Victims often are forced to live in squalid conditions or are put to work in the sex industry. Sometimes they are physically abused.
“It’s become a sort of cottage industry,” Gaetz said.
He said the traffickers posing as temporary labor brokers use fancy fliers showing pictures of Miami Beach or Disney World to lure young people to come to the United States.
“Then they coerce them into living in a mobile home somewhere in Northwest Florida, walking seven miles to sling hash at Waffle House,” Gaetz said.
The traffickers deduct from workers’ paychecks until they are compensated almost nothing. They are kept destitute in an unfamiliar place, are unaware of their labor rights and are threatened if they try to speak up.
Gaetz said the trafficking has elements of organized crime that make many people afraid to come forward.
Florida is the third most popular state for human trafficking. In addition to tourism, the problem is prevalent in the agricultural industry in South Florida, where several cases of modern-day slavery have been successfully prosecuted.
In one case, men were enslaved in a cargo truck in Immokalee and forced to pick tomatoes during the day.
One of the biggest human trafficking busts in the service industry in recent years was in Miramar Beach, Gaetz said.
Several cases have been documented in Northwest Florida, but prosecutions are few and far between.
One reason for that is the legal definition for the crime is narrow.
“You have to almost prove physical coercion, that someone was grabbed and thrown into a van, under Florida’s existing laws,” Gaetz said.
Among other changes, the bill would include economic coercion in the state’s definition of human trafficking, not just physical coercion, he said.
“It’s going to make it far easier for our local law enforcement or our local state attorney to make out cases against these gangsters,” he said.
George Collins, an inspector with the Okaloosa County Sheriff’s Office who has worked on human trafficking issues, said the bill is a step in the right direction.
“It will give us some more tools in the fight to try and discourage the economic exploitation as well as other forms of trafficking,” he said.
The bill also combines all human trafficking statutes into the same law, enhances penalties and includes pornography and sexually explicit performances in the definition of commercial sexual activity.
The bill has passed out of two House committees with bipartisan support and is now scheduled for consideration by the full House. A companion bill in the Senate also has passed through several committees and is set to go before the Budget Committee.
Gaetz said that while the bill will help, awareness is key.
“I think that one of the best things we can do to alleviate the problem is if people opened their eyes to the human trafficking that is happening in our community,” he said.
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