Political Dynamics of Passing Trafficking Legislation

"For those of you who think that human trafficking is something that happens in big cities…the sad news that I’m here to report is that it’s also going on in our backyards. So the time is now, the time is right, for this [legislative] body to take the action this morning to strengthen those laws."
Quote from Rep. Sannie Overly, introducing HB 3 on the floor of the Kentucky House of Representatives, March 5th 2013

Every state experiences political dynamics in attempting to pass human trafficking legislation. My research has shown that the story of Kentucky's HB 3 is quite interesting.

In 2013 state legislators in Kentucky were feeling significant pressure to pass CSEC legislation. The legislature had previously failed to pass HB 350, prior human trafficking legislation introduced in the Kentucky General Assembly, in the previous year's session. In 2012, HB 350 passed the House, but stalled in the Senate in the final weeks of the 2012 session. In the final hours of session, the Senate Judiciary Committee approved the bill, but did not meet the reading requirements to bring the bill to the floor for final passage. The Senate President called it an “oversight” and argued that failure to pass the bill did not “indicate any lack of Senate support for wanting to deal with the problem.”

Despite the Senate President’s words at the end of session, Kentucky stakeholders who supported the trafficking legislation believed the legislation failed in 2012 because of a lack of buy-in from the state legislature. The 2012 session was a budget year (the Kentucky General Assembly passes a two-year budget every other year), and bills have a history of failing in the last hours of the session because many are held until the budget passes, at which point the General Assembly has too little time to vote on legislation before it must adjourn for the year.

Given the failure of HB 350, human trafficking advocates decided to convene a group of policymakers (including other legislators) over the summer of 2012 to plan for the following session. The legislature also decided to form another state policy group in the summer of 2012: the Unified Juvenile Code Task Force. The Unified Juvenile Code Task Force had identified a primary issue for their work: status offenders (particularly runaways and truant youth) who were being incarcerated in juvenile detention. The fact that status offenders were being held in detention in Kentucky was a huge media issue and a symbol of how Kentucky was “falling behind” the rest of the country in its responses to children in trouble. In addition, the Rescue and Restore task force identified that a large proportion of trafficking victims in Kentucky. More than 100 trafficking victims had been identified since 2008, and more than half of them were children. Because of the specific issues related to the trafficking population in Kentucky, and the political focus on status offenders, the human trafficking policy group decided to focus the 2013 trafficking legislation on child trafficking victims in Kentucky.

The product of this human trafficking policy group was HB 3. HB 3 was introduced in the 2013 legislative session with more than 80 co-sponsors. In March 2013, it unanimously passed the General Assembly and the following week it was signed by the Governor.

As I begin to formulate policy recommendations, I am considering the political implications of each of them - particularly those that would require legislative changes.