Human Trafficking in Nebraska

Governor Pete Ricketts has named January human trafficking awareness month. Human trafficking in the U.S. has been a growing issue as more victims come forward.  

The Nebraska Family Alliance (NFA) estimate that worldwide 5 million people are victims of sex trafficking and 15 million labor trafficked. 25% of these victims are children and 71% of them are female.  

According to the Deliver Fund every 2.5 hours a child becomes the victim of human trafficking. The fund also states that each child that is a victim of sex trafficking is purchased for sex 5.4 times a day. 

Nationally every 1 in 6 children will be a victim of human trafficking in the U.S. according to the Nebraska attorney general. The world population review rates the U.S. to have the worst human trafficking rates of any developed country.  

The Polaris Project is an organization that works to fight human trafficking in the U.S. in 2019 they were called to 11,500 situations and worked with 22,326. There were 15,222 females and 3,003 males, the rest are unknown.  

The human trafficking hotline which calculates its statistics through calls they receive in 2019 they received 91 victim calls in Nebraska. At least 22 of these calls were high indicator calls meaning they are considered to be cases of human trafficking.  

Ricketts’ human trafficking task force says that the average of 47 Nebraska school girls are victims of human trafficking each year. This number is considered by the NFA to be an underestimate to the true number. The survey used to calculate that number had a 6% response rate.  

Prior to 2015 in Nebraska activities that were related to human trafficking were not considered criminal. Those activities that were covered by law had low penalties.

In 2015 a bill that allowed victims to peruse civil remedy against trafficking. Then in 2018 penalties for human traffickers increased and reporting requirements for sexual assault increased. By 2019 the statue of limitations for sex trafficking was eliminated.

The prosecution and convictions of human traffickers in Nebraska has been increasing since 2018, with the last four convictions taking place in Scottsbluff.

Though human trafficking is often portrayed as kidnapping, according to the Polaris Project most cases of human trafficking occur when the victim knew the traffickers. Marriage proposals or significant others were the biggest type of traffickers, the second was family connections. 

Sex trafficking involves forcing someone to perform sexual acts, where the trafficker receives financial gain. People can be victims of sexual trafficking, while still living at home and going to school. 

Labor trafficking is considered to be forced labor with out pay. Often times the trafficker will use threats to coerce victims into working