President Bush has signed the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act of 2005, H.R. 972, a bill whose frequent use of the term "commercial sex act" to describe "any sex act on account of which anything of value is given to or received by any person" is likely to cause trouble for the adult industry.
"In today's world, too often human traffickers abuse the trust of children and expose them to the worst of life at a young age," Bush said during the bill signing ceremony Monday. "It takes a perverse form of evil to exploit and hurt those vulnerable members of society. Human traffickers operate with greed and without conscience, treating their victims as nothing more than goods and commodities for sale to the highest bidder... Thousands of teenagers and young girls are trafficked into the United States every year. They're held hostage. They're forced to submit to unspeakable evil."
"We're attacking this problem aggressively," he continued. "Over the past four years, the Department of Homeland Security has taken new measures to protect children from sexual predators, as well as pornography and prostitution rings. The Department of Health and Human Services has partnered with faith-based and community organizations to form anti-trafficking coalitions in 17 major cities across our country. The Department of Justice has more than tripled the number of cases brought against these traffickers." [Emphasis added.]
However, the adult video industry doesn't use trafficked women, if for no other reason than that it is required, under 18 U.S.C. §2257, to keep records on all performers in sexually explicit videos, and trafficked women would have no such records.
That hasn't stopped Sen. Sam Brownback (R-Kan.), among others, from attempting to link trafficking to legitimate adult entertainment, and in both of his Senate Judiciary Committee hearings last year on the subject of pornography, he asked witnesses whether human sex trafficking played any part in the industry. He has also met with L.A. city councilman Tony Cardenas to discuss such trafficking, but neither Brownback nor Cardenas has issued any report as to what was discussed.
The Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act requires the U.S. Attorney General to conduct several studies over the next couple of years, some of which include attempts to quantify how many adults purchase "commercial sexual acts" and how much is spent on them. Certainly, one of the uses for these figures when the reports are complete will be to target the (completely legal) adult entertainment industry for control and/or taxation – and we'll just have to wait and see if the Justice Department attempts to use some language in the bill to pile on charges after an obscenity bust.
Let's hope the Justice Department spends the $2.5 million per year that it's getting for these studies wisely.
