Congress passes bill to support ‘self-care’ for people pursuing prostitution

Both houses of Congress have passed the IMPACTT Human Trafficking Act (S.670) and it is now awaiting President Joe Biden’s signature. The bill would provide “self-care” services to Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) employees exposed to human trafficking victims.

On its face, there is nothing wrong with providing additional psychological support to federal agents working with human trafficking survivors. But HSI – a division of Immigration and Customs Enforcement – ​​has a rather questionable track record when it comes to “helping” victims of human trafficking. Sometimes HSI is known to subdue suspected victims to potentially traumatizing experiences. And much of the “human trafficking” work the organization does involves plain old prostitution measures.

HSI’s human trafficking ‘aid’

Check the fine print of state and local police sex excursions and you’ll often see HSI listed as an affiliate, especially when these prostitution crackdowns target Asian massage businesses.

At best, these incentives are often a dubious use of resources and authority – marshaling the power of Homeland Security to, for example, arrest a few dozen men who want to pay a consenting adult woman for sex, or arresting people with “escort service” violations’ and arbitrary behavior. outstanding warrants.

At worst, they place people vulnerable to violence and sexual exploitation in more precarious positions – for example, by helping to arrest sex workers and burden them with legal costs and criminal records, or by helping to seize the assets of immigrant sex workers and masseuses – and even subjecting suspected trafficking victims to sexual encounters under false pretenses.

For example, HSI agents had at least seventeen sexual encounters with Asian massage workers in Mohave County, Arizona, in 2018. These excursions, called “Operation Asian Touch,” were billed as a way to investigate human trafficking.

Women arrested for engaging in paid sex acts with HSI agents or informants may subsequently be deported.

This does not mean that HSI never helps investigate cases of actual violence and exploitation involving prostitution. But as I’ve covered this area for a decade, I’ve come across countless cases in which HSI provided questionable or even dangerous “assistance” to trafficking victims, and vastly fewer cases in which the agency actually appeared to put an end to the abuse.

Whatever good HSI does in the sex trafficking arena, it is quite secondary to the many activities that simply target sex workers, massage workers and their clients.

What the IMPACTT Human Trafficking Act Would Do (and Wouldn’t Do).

The IMPACTT Human Trafficking Act, from Senator Gary Peters (D-Mich.), was co-sponsored by two Republicans (Oklahoma Senator James Lankford and Texas Senator John Cornyn).

The first thing it would do is establish within HSI an Investigators Maintaining Purposeful Awareness to Trafficking Trauma (IMPACTT) program to “provide outreach and training” to HSI employees who are “exposed to various forms of trauma when working with victims of human trafficking”. .” The training could include “self-awareness training” on recognizing issues like burnout, “compassion fatigue” and “vicarious trauma,” along with education on “self-care mechanisms and resilience.”

I don’t know about you, but I find it a little funny and also extremely eyeroll-worthy to see how self-help social media tropes like “self-care” and “burnout” are creeping into federal law.

In any case, this bill is not just about providing resilience training to the poor HSI agents who are forced to round up immigrant women for prostitution.

It would also create a formal HSI Victim Assistance Program to “provide supervision, guidance, training, travel, equipment and coordination to Homeland Security Investigations victim assistance personnel” and recruit more forensic interview specialists and victim assistance specialists. “Currently, only the largest HSI field offices have a victim services specialist, but this legislation would ensure that every HSI office with a human trafficking or child exploitation task force would have a survivor services specialist to carry out this important work ” said Rep. Glenn Ivey (D-Md.) during a House debate on the bill on September 23.

The effectiveness of these specialists is open to debate. I often see the press reporting on prostitution attacks nod to the victim assistance specialists that HSI had available, but there is no indication that these specialists helped in any substantial way or even found victims to help. Still, theoretically they are there to offer kinder, gentler, trauma-informed interactions with potential victims, and that can’t be a bad thing.

The victim assistance program would also be mandated to provide material support. One of the few tangible things the IMPACTT bill stipulates is that the victim assistance program will “purchase emergency items necessary to assist identified victims in Homeland Security Investigations criminal investigations, including food, clothing, hygiene products, transportation, and temporary shelter that are not otherwise provided by a non-governmental organization.”

Of course, “no additional funds should be used to implement this law,” which is telling. I’m not saying HSI needs no more money for these purposes. But bills aimed at deploying more police and more enforcement to a problem usually come with large budget increases, so it seems worth pointing out that expanding services to victims is not getting a commensurate boost.

More sex and tech news

• “Four lawsuits. Several failed attempts to raise the threshold to implement constitutional changes. One unprecedented attempt to decertify a ballot. Despite this succession of failed efforts by the Republican Party to torpedo Amendment 3 over the past 18 months, abortion will remain on Missouri’s agenda in November. 5 votes,” reports the Missouri independent.

• Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) has introduced a bill that would require all owners and employees of massage businesses and wellness spas to be fingerprinted and undergo background checks.

• Don’t forget that the people fighting to remove all kinds of books from library shelves are the same people who are “passing laws that restrict consensual and legal online porn through unjust age verification laws,” writes Michael McGrady at Tech dirt.

Today’s image