Virginia M. Kendall - Child Exploitation and Trafficking: Examining Global Enforcement and Supply Chain Challenges and U.S. Responses

Child Exploitation and Trafficking

Child Exploitation and Trafficking

Examining Global Enforcement and Supply Chain Challenges and U.S. Responses

Second Edition

Virginia M. Kendall and T. Markus Funk

Foreword by Richard A. Posner

ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Kendall, Virginia M., 1962 author. | Funk, T. Markus, author.

Title: Child exploitation and trafficking : examining global enforcement and supply chain challenges and U.S. responses / Virginia M. Kendall and T. Markus Funk.

Description: Second edition. | Lanham : Rowman & Littlefield [2016] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016033793 (print) | LCCN 2016034328 (ebook) | ISBN 9781442264786 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781442264793 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781442264809 (electronic)

Subjects: LCSH: Child trafficking victimsLegal status, laws, etc.United States. | Human traffickingUnited States. | Human TraffickingInvestigationUnited States. | Child sexual abuseUnited StatesPrevention. | Child trafficking victimsLegal status, laws, etc. | Human traffickingInvestigation.

Classification: LCC KF9449 .K46 2016 (print) | LCC KF9449 (ebook) | DDC 345.73/0253dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016033793

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information SciencesPermanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Printed in the United States of America

Contents

Richard A. Posner

Richard A. Posner

Child Exploitation, Trafficking, and Company Supply Chains by Virginia M. Kendall and T. Markus Funk is a detailed, lucid, and comprehensive legal treatise with its principal focus on a major global crime wavesexual abuse of children and human trafficking in supply chains (supply of children from one part of the world to another part in which there is a demand for child labor)and on the efforts of the United States and other nations to combat such abuse. Supply chains are simply systems for moving products and equipmentbut often workers as wellfrom supplier to ultimate consumer. Some worker supply chains are used to transport young peopleoften girls who think they are being hired for lawful jobsto sites where they will be sexually exploited. Other worker supply chains just move children to places where their labor is in demand. The authors principle focus is on the supply of children for sex, but they also discuss the supply of children (and adults) for labor.

I was honored to be asked to write the foreword to the first edition of this book, published five years ago; I am honored to be asked to write the foreword to this, the second edition. The book is massive and I cannot do full justice to it in the space allowed for a foreword, especially as this new edition includes two important new chapters (chapters 5 and 13 in the new editionone involving child labor). I will address them at the end of this new foreword; I have also made revisions in the original parts of the foreword.

As I explained in the original foreword, the authors are admirably equipped to tackle this difficult and important subject (really subjects). Judge Kendall is an experienced federal district judge and former federal prosecutor who headed up the sex-crimes unit in the office of the U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Illinoisone of the most important field offices of the Department of Justice, embracing as it does the entire Chicago metropolitan area. Mr. Funk is also a former federal prosecutor, and a present practicing lawyer. Judge Kendall has prosecuted hundreds of criminals and now tries and sentences them; Mr. Funk has both prosecuted and defended individuals and companies accused of offenses. Together, as federal prosecutors in Chicago, they litigated dozens of exploitations cases, including the high-profile prosecution of pediatrician Marc Watzmann, recounted in fascinating detail in the book.

The book describes the varieties of sexual abuse of children, the legal tools available to cope with them (with particular emphasis on United States and international law), the methods of investigating and proving child sexual abuse, and (overlapping the methodologies of investigation and proof) the legal rules (including constitutional and statutory constraints, and increasingly supply chain laws that specifically target sexual and labor trafficking of children and adults). The book is fair-minded with attention being paid to defending against accusations of child sexual abuse as well as prosecuting. The book is and will continue to be an invaluable resource to judges, prosecutors, police, criminologists, and the defense bar; not the least of its merits is simply unpacking the many layers of Americas complex and redundant set of federal criminal prohibitions of child sexual abuse. Sex crime involving children is a major focus of federal law enforcement and a major subject of federal criminal litigation; participants in that litigationwhether as judges, prosecutors, investigators, or defense lawyersI am sure find the Kendall-Funk treatise indispensable. It is of great value to me in the many appeals my court receives from convictions and sentences in cases of sex crimes against children.

There is nothing new about the sexual abuse of children, and, as the authors note, some observers think that the United States has an unhealthy, prurient, and perhaps even hysterical obsession with the problem. We do seem to take it a good deal more seriously than other nations; but then we may have a more serious problem with it than many other nations because of the pervasiveness of our Internet connections.

The authors are persuasive that sexual and labor exploitation of children deserves to be taken seriously as a major criminal activity. But what is true and concerning is the definition of child in our laws relating to sexual abuse: generally it is anyone under the age of 18, and the authors suggest that it be made the international norm. Yet the age of consent even in countries that we consider our peers is generally lower. Given contemporary sexual mores, there is an argument for reducing it in the United States to 16, which would automatically reduce the amplitude of the sexual abuse crime wave. That issue to one side, there is a strong argument for making it uniform across the states of the United States, and for reconsidering the paradox that minors well below the age of consent are considered mature enough to be punished as adults for most crimes, including murder.

Consideration needs also to be given to the desirability and feasibility of legalizing prostitution, though of course not child prostitution. The relevance of adult prostitution to sexual abuse of children is that where adult prostitution is legal, as it is to a greater or lesser extent in many European countries (and of course elsewhere in the world as well), the ugly practice described by the authors of recruiting preadult girls as prostitutes because they are more easily inveigled and controlled would probably diminish as the supply of adult women willing to work as prostitutes increased.