The Atlanta Lawyer April 2013 | Page 14

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