Winning the Battle, Not the War…Yet
As more states have enacted state-level laws against human trafficking, advocates have celebrated these landmark victories. States now have additional tools to target criminals who exploit others by compelling them into commercial sex, labor, or services. [Read more →]

I’d like to direct your attention to some recent media activity about Japan and an American journalist living there named Jake Adelstein.  Jake’s new book, entitled Tokyo Vice: An American Reporter on the Police Beat in Japan, is a memoir of his experiences investigating the Yakuza, one of the largest crime syndicates in the country.  He recently discussed this topic on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and on NPR. [Read more →]

This week Secretary of State Clinton and my successor as anti-trafficking ambassador, former anti-slavery prosecutor Luis CdeBaca, rolled out the annual Trafficking in Persons Report. The rollout embodied the bipartisan and inter-branch support of the anti-slavery issue which I experienced as ambassador. This report is an invaluable tool to nudge and prod other governments to improve their records fighting slavery. Whether they had a welcoming or grousing response, governments focused on their anti-trafficking efforts after reading the report. At the UN world conference on human trafficking in Vienna in February 2008, I heard dozens consider it rightly the state-of-the-art global report, like no other. [Read more →]