Exploring Differences in Anti-Human Trafficking Laws in the American States

Why have some states adopted more comprehensive anti-human trafficking laws than other states? This paper answers that question in relation to the adoption of anti-human trafficking legislation over the past decade. Human trafficking is the greatest human rights challenge of our time and is reputedly the fastest growing criminal enterprise in the world. The UN recognized the seriousness of the problem when it passed the UN Convention against Transnational Organized Crime in 2000. The key anti-trafficking element of that document was the Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, Especially Women and Children (or the Palermo Protocol), which called on member states to pass national legislation against human trafficking. The same year, the United States passed the Trafficking Victims Protection Act (TVPA). When the TVPA passed, no US state had statutes criminalizing human trafficking. By 2013, all US stats had passed such legislation. In previous research, we examined the factors that led to the rapid diffusion of anti-trafficking state law. In this paper, we will account for the wide variation in the comprehensiveness of anti-trafficking law that we found to exist across the states in this earlier work