Civil Society

The world watches in horror as we are learning that innocent Haitian children are likely to be victimized by human traffickers. Minnesotans need to protect these children who may be coming to Minnesota.

Minnesota anti-sex trafficking law does not protect all Haitian and other young innocent children from being sex trafficked. These young children in Minnesota are often sold to one party for sex. The internet helps to make this possible.

Minnesota Statutes 609.321, Minnesota's anti sex trafficking law, has a glaring gap. The law allows sex traffickers who sell children for sex to one individual to go free under the anti-sex trafficking law. This type of sex trafficking of very young children is common in Minnesota. We need to convict these sex traffickers under the Minnesota anti-trafficking law so that Minnesota law enforcement can notify the Office of Homeland Security that the trafficker was convicted of sex trafficking and request that they do not allow the trafficker to bring any more children into the United States.

Recently, Civil Society, which hosts the Minnesota Human Trafficking Crisis and Tip Line, has stopped the child trafficking of five children who the trafficker brought into Minnesota using five fraudulent visas. The trafficker was intending to use the five visas again in order to bring five more children into Minnesota! Civil Society was able to request that the Office of Homeland Security prevent the trafficker from bringing any other children into the United States. We were also able to report the probable international trafficking of a young Haitian girl in Minnesota to law enforcement.

One half of the 14,500 to 17,500 human trafficking victims brought into the United States each year are children. Minnesota has made our very young trafficked children more vulnerable to sex trafficking by retaining this gap in the law which allows safe of children to one party for sex.

Minnesota adopts more foreign children than any other states and we have recently seen that fraudulent adoption agencies operate in Minnesota. It is important to note that many good people may be seeking to bring Haitian children to the United States. Some of these good people, with their focus on the innocent suffering children, do not understand the importance of complete legal documentation for these children. Some of these traumatized children have an affective attachment disorder. Many adopting parents in Minnesota and other states give up on trying to form a good parent-child relationship and try to obtain foster placement for the children when there are problems in the home. This is occurring frequently in Minnesota. These adoptive parents, then, forget to complete the immigration paper work for the children. The children may end up going through attempted, unsuccessful foster home placements and frequently run away. Since they are undocumented, these children become very vulnerable to sex traffickers.

Other Minnesota law could be used to prosecute these traffickers, however, it is very important that law enforcement be able to notify the Office of Homeland Security that a trafficker has been convicted under our sex trafficking law so that the Office of Homeland Security can more readily prevent the sex traffickers from trafficking our very young innocent children.

Linda Miller, Child Sex Slave Campaign

Civil Society
1st National Bank Building
332 Minnesota Street
Suite E-1436
St. Paul, MN 55101
Phone: 651-291-0713
FAX: 651-291-2588
www.civilsocietyhelps.org