When Victims Offend
Should we charge them with crimes?
By Margie Quin, CEO
For the last six years, I have had the good fortune to be a member of Shared Hope International’s JuST (Juvenile Sex Trafficking) Council. We are a multi-disciplinary group dedicated to the hard work of bringing education and awareness to a very complicated subject – human sex trafficking. As a Council, we have released several White Papers on various subjects. Three years ago, we were debating as a Council, what subject matter we would tackle next – and the subject of Victim/Offender Intersectionality arose. Too often, victims of trafficking were being charged and convicted of trafficking offenses when they themselves were a victim of trafficking. There was much conversation around whether we could tackle this topic – we didn’t always all agree on everything. I advocated for the Council to take this on, reasoning that if we couldn’t address this, who could?
For three years, the Council members, with help from The Villanova University Charles Widger School of Law’s Institute to address Commercial Sexual Exploitation, researched and debated the issue of victims who offend, victims who also commit crimes. That long-anticipated report was released this January, 2020. I was the only active member of the council at the time who was in law enforcement – the pressure was on. I felt the need to both defend the practices of law enforcement as well as advocate for the right treatment of victims of crime. It’s quite the conundrum when you are faced with a crime committing victim. But, human trafficking was such a different type of crime, one I’d never encountered in my two and a half decades in policing.
It is a tried-and-true practice in law enforcement to arrest your way up in a conspiracy case – start with the low-level criminals and flip your way up or compel testimony and evidence by charging other conspirators.
It’s a great tactic or strategy if you are going after a drug trafficking organization or trying to compel testimony from a co-conspirator against the main target. It makes sense that law enforcement would use these same tactics to dismantle a human trafficking conspiracy – except the “low level” conspirators are almost always women who were being trafficked. Well, you can see how that’s a game-changer.
No longer was it so easy to charge your way up to the trafficker by using coercive tactics like holding criminal charges over their heads or actually charging women with trafficking offenses.
Over the years, I have learned from survivors of trafficking and many have said that jail saved their lives. There is a line in the sand – some crimes must be punished. Sometimes that break from the trafficker, a cooling off period is necessary to be able to start a conversation about their victimization. The question is, can we do that without hanging a multi-year, forever on the sex offender registry sentence on their record? Criminal Justice Reform. We are coming around to the idea that the harsh tactics of the past decades have had unintended consequences, haven’t had desirable results. Punishment is okay – but it begs the question, should it be a life-long sentence for most crimes, an eye for an eye? Are we living in a new testament or old testament world? I’m pretty sure the answer is a “New Testament” world. So, let’s begin to adapt our way of thinking and give grace when and where we can.
The law recognizes coercion as a defense to crime – and these victims are universally coerced. You may be thinking to yourself, wait – why wouldn’t trafficking victims testify against their trafficker? It’s called trauma-bonding – and it’s a phenomenon whereby a trafficking victim bonds with her abuser and feels love and loyalty to the person who harms them the most (oversimplified definition of a super complex issue). These bonds are extremely difficult to break – and always require months, if not years, of intensive therapy and counselling. Most prosecutors aren’t going to wait years for a victim to get to that point.
That’s where nonprofits are critical in this fight against human trafficking. Working with survivors of sex and labor trafficking, we have the expertise and resources to start a victim down that road to healing and hopefully justice. More and more we are seeing victims empowered through our programming to stand up to their trafficker, face them down in court and participate in their own justice. Not every victim will get to that point, not every victim wants that kind of healing – and that’s okay – we must be willing to say that’s okay, without leveraging criminal charges to compel testimony.
As law enforcement receives more and more training and experience working and prosecuting these types of cases, they will be less and less dependent on the testimony of a victim as their critical piece of evidence. That said, no prosecutor will go to trial without a victim – so some cooperation or participation will always be ideal.
End Slavery Tennessee is Middle Tennessee law enforcement’s “go-to” agency for victim aftercare. With critical community partnerships, we deliver and coordinate holistic healing for this victim population. We regularly go with our clients to court and support them through what can be a very traumatizing experience. They have lived with fear and coercive tactics, sometimes for years – sometimes it’s all they remember. The criminal justice system can be both justice-finding and judicious. With this newest report from Shared Hope leading the way, we can develop new strategies and tactics to bring victims the justice they so richly deserve.
Read Shared Hope International’s Responding to Sex Trafficking: Victim-Offender Intersectionality, A Guide for Criminal Justice Stakeholders.