The “Justice for Victims of Trafficking Act of 2015,” which would create a fund for victims of sex trafficking, passed in April after spending weeks stalled in the Senate. Underlying the act is a consensus, as the bill’s wording states, to regard “all human traffickers as violent criminals.” However, as Tom Kecskemethy wrote in our May/June 2015 issue, when the relationship is between pimp and prostitute, things can be trickier. Experienced sex workers, he writes, sometimes seek out the help of pimps and dictate the terms of the partnership. In those cases, punishing pimps may not be unequivocally beneficial to people the bill is intended to protect.
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