LAW DAY 2013
Combatting Modern Day Slavery in Georgia
in the Twenty-First Century
By Sally Quillian Yates, Susan Coppedge, and Richard Moultrie
United States Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of Georgia
I
n January of this year, a local sheriff’s deputy stopped
a motorist for speeding during a routine traffic stop on
Interstate 20. The 29-year-old driver was riding in the
vehicle with a 17-year-old girl. Ordinarily, the deputy would
have ticketed the driver, and permitted the driver and the
young girl to continue on their way. But the deputy, who had
recently received training from a Human Trafficking Unit run
by the Georgia Bureau of Investigation (GBI), was attuned
to indications of possible human trafficking. So the deputy
separated the young girl from the driver and learned that the
driver was selling her for sex. Ultimately, this young girl was
rescued, and she told the GBI agents who later interviewed
her that she had prayed to be rescued, and that she felt that
God had answered her prayers.
This child’s harrowing experience is a common one for
victims of sex trafficking in Georgia. Human trafficking cases
used to be found out in the open; pimps worked “the track” in
Atlanta, streets such as Metropolitan Parkway and Peachtree
David Rubenstein
14
THE ATLANTA LAWYER
April 2013
s
Road, where they made young girls stand outside and solicit
men to buy sex. Now human traffickers have moved online, first advertising on Craigslist.org and then moving to
Backpage.com. Advertisements contain codes to let paying
customers know they are buying young girls: “t33n;” “fresh;”
and “barely 18.” While the traffickers have become more
covert, the laws against trafficking have been enhanced. For
example, conspiracies to engage in sex trafficking now carry
the same potential life sentence as the completed substantive
crime, and those who knowingly purchase juveniles for sex
can be prosecuted as human traffickers.
The Atlanta area is a major hub for human trafficking in the
United States and one of fourteen cities in the United States
with the highest levels of sex trafficking of children, according
to statistics compiled by the Federal Bureau of Investigation
(FBI). My office, the United States Attorney’s Office for
the Northern District of Georgia, is committed to pursuing
a comprehensive and proactive strategy of targeting and
jailing those who would exploit the most vulnerable in our
society. For example, our office has assigned two attorneys
to primarily handle anti-human trafficking matters, including
an attorney tasked with coordinating the in-take of these
offenses. In 2012 alone, we obtained indictments in six
trafficking cases involving nine minors who range between
the ages of 14 and 17 years. And in the last two years, our
office has brought cases against 30 traffickers involving
36 victims, including children as young as 12 years old.
Additionally, in 2011, Atlanta was chosen in a competitive
selection process to serve as one of six national AntiTrafficking Coordination Teams, called “ACTeams.” The team
comprises representatives from the Department of Justice,
Department of Homeland Security, and Department of Labor
who meet quarterly to coordinate investigations and develop
more high impact prosecutions in an attempt to dismantle
trafficking organizations. Our office also works closely and
frequently with state and local law enforcement agencies,
like the GBI, to target and prosecute traffickers in this district.
We are employing a comprehensive approach to combatting
human trafficking – combining aggressive federal and local
law enforcement initiatives with victim support services.
We receive critical support from non-governmental
organizations (NGOs). Crimes involving human trafficking
can be especially hard to uncover. Victims are often and
The Official News Publication of the Atlanta Bar Association