BILL REQ. #:  H-0517.1 

Read first time 01/20/2003.   Referred to Committee on Judiciary.

     AN ACT Relating to trafficking; adding a new section to chapter 43.10 RCW; and creating a new section.

BE IT ENACTED BY THE LEGISLATURE OF THE STATE OF WASHINGTON:

NEW SECTION.  Sec. 1   (1) The degrading institution of slavery continues throughout the world. Trafficking in people is a modern form of slavery, and it is the largest manifestation of slavery today. At least seven hundred thousand people annually, primarily women and children, are trafficked within or across international borders. Approximately fifty thousand women and children are trafficked into the United States each year.
     (2) Many people are trafficked into the international sex trade, often by force, fraud, or coercion. The sex industry has rapidly expanded over the past several decades. It involves sexual exploitation of people, predominantly women and girls, involving activities related to prostitution, pornography, sex tourism, and other commercial sexual services. The low status of women in many parts of the world has contributed to a burgeoning of the trafficking industry.
     (3) Trafficking in people is not limited to the sex industry. This growing transnational crime also includes forced labor and involves significant violations of labor, public health, and human rights standards worldwide.
     (4) Traffickers primarily target women and girls, who are disproportionately affected by poverty, the lack of access to education, chronic unemployment, discrimination, and the lack of economic opportunities in their countries of origin. Traffickers lure women and girls into their networks through false promises of decent working conditions at relatively good pay as nannies, maids, dancers, factory workers, restaurant workers, sales clerks, or models. Traffickers also buy children from poor families and sell them into prostitution or into various types of forced or bonded labor.
     (5) Trafficking victims are often forced through physical violence to engage in sex acts or perform slavery-like labor. Such force includes rape and other forms of sexual abuse, torture, starvation, imprisonment, threats, psychological abuse, and coercion.
     (6) To deter trafficking and bring its perpetrators to justice, Washington must recognize that trafficking is a serious offense. This is done by prescribing appropriate punishment, giving priority to the prosecution of trafficking offenses, developing expertise on issues of trafficking, and protecting rather than punishing the victims of such offenses.

NEW SECTION.  Sec. 2   A new section is added to chapter 43.10 RCW to read as follows:
     The attorney general must require assistant attorneys general, especially those assistant attorneys general who have the department of social and health services as a client agency, to study trafficking issues so they can develop a better understanding and an expertise on these issues. They must also study appropriate punishments, ways to give priority to trafficking offenses, and ways to protect trafficking victims.