Kammer 1

Alley Kammer
English Writing 103
Professor Wildman
19 September 2012
Land of the Free, Home of the Slave
It is hard to imagine a world still facing bondage and oppression after all that our country
has been through to defend the freedoms and rights of each person within its bounds. There are,
however, people that still face this dark reality each day, living in fear, guilt, and shame. In her
essay Identifying Human Trafficking Victims, Barbara Stolz recognizes that the information
law enforcements use to gauge the policies they enforce to control trafficking is not sufficient.
She states, Although the importance of the role that state and local law enforcement plays in
combating human trafficking generally is recognized, information is lacking about the readiness
these agencies to investigate trafficking crimes (Stolz 267). Stolz, a political scientist,
criminologist, and the senior analyst at the U.S. Government Accountability Office, has worked
in academia, government, and has published a book and several articles on the making of
criminal justice policy.
In her article Stolz discusses federally sponsored state and local human trafficking lawenforcement task forces. She finds that a recurring theme in human trafficking literature is the
challenge posed by the need to identify victims (Stolz 268). This problem stems from the victims
themselves as well as the need to reform thinking about certain aspects of the traditional lawenforcement policy. According to Stolz, many victims choose not to self-identify because they

Kammer 2
are: in self-denial, fearful of law enforcement or retaliation of traffickers against their families,
shameful, in love with their trafficker, subject to cultural norms, held back by language barriers,
unable to express complex emotions or psychological trauma, or have lack of knowledge in
properly identifying oneself as a victim. This leaves much interpretation up to law enforcement
and there are many outside circumstances that prevent this from occurring effectively. In order to
be effective at identifying victims, law enforcement must learn outside variables that can hinder
the identification of a trafficking victim.
There are several myths that law-enforcement agents must overcome in order to
successfully combat this issue. One of the myths is that victims are actually U.S. citizens. Other
fallacies include victims having knowledge about the type of employment they are engaging in
before they are trafficked, or that the victims are married to their traffickers. The governments
response to this growing issue and the misconceptions that follow include more training for law
enforcement and pamphlets describing details of typical victims and outside occurrences. Stolz
includes four recommendations to improve law-enforcement identification of human trafficking:
training more officers, guiding identification of victims, improving data collection about victims,
and increasing the local response to the crime.
The first recommendation Stolz offers is to train more officers to identify and respond to
human trafficking. She believes it would be an effective step in an overwhelming process if the
federal government [developed] model protocols to guide law-enforcement agencies and their
potential partners on human trafficking identification and response (Stolz 272). She feels that
with a more uniform system, the knowledge of human trafficking would be increased, therefore

Kammer 3
leading to a more informed law-enforcement and more effective means of decreasing the
occurrences of human trafficking in the U.S. The second improvement Stolz recommends is to
guide human trafficking identification and response. She believes that law enforcement agencies
could be more intentional in informing their agents about the various ways a trafficking situation
could look to an outside party. Visual cues, as well as relational cues, are all part of revealing the
truth of the situation they are investigating. Thirdly, it would be helpful to improve the collection
and reporting of data on human trafficking investigations. If the agents were able to find more
accurate ways to identify victims and traffickers and prosecute them, it would be much easier to
develop accurate statistics regarding trafficking in the U.S. With more accurate information, the
government and agencies would be able to more properly assess this growing problem and
strategies to solve it. Lastly, Stolz believes that integrating human trafficking response into local
crime activities would improve law-enforcement identification of human trafficking. The more
knowledge police officers and the general public have about a certain issue, the more likely they
will be able to identify and aid in the solution.
According to Stolz, while there are many strong aspects to the current program fighting
against trafficking, there is room for many improvements to be initiated in the identification of
victims and encouragement of awareness of the general public. The U.S. response to human
trafficking is neither the first nor last crime initiative for which state and local law-enforcement
has had to take on responsibilities originating at the federal level (Stolz 273). Throughout the
article, Stolz gives tangible ideas to a grave issue in the U.S. Ultimately it will only be through
the small, but collective efforts of our society that we will see a day in which the trafficked and
the enslaved will truly live in the land of the free.