The anti-trafficking field in the United States is composed primarily of organisations who provide direct services to survivors of human trafficking. This typically includes social services such as counselling and legal services. The US government provides around $300 million per year to this field, and year after year that funding increases and the field grows.
Beyond their main work of helping survivors, anti-trafficking organisations advocate for policy change and reforms to benefit survivors or prevent human trafficking. At the state and federal levels, they contribute their knowledge about how trafficking happens and how people are affected by both trafficking and official responses to trafficking.
The federally funded anti-trafficking field interacts with sex workers when they serve and protect survivors: survivors may work alongside, or are at times themselves, voluntary sex workers. Criminalisation of the sex industry clearly harms survivors of trafficking in the sex trade. However, the majority of these organisations believe that their receipt of federal money prevents them from advocating for the end of criminalisation. A legislative provision known as the ‘Anti-Prostitution Pledge’ requires federal grantees to sign a statement that they will not “promote, support, or advocate the legalization or practice of prostitution”. This was first enacted in 2003 as part of President George W. Bush’s programme to fight HIV/AIDS around the world (which also included a provision directing one third of prevention spending towards ‘abstinence only’ initiatives). Shortly thereafter, the Anti-Prostitution Pledge was also added to the Trafficking Victims Protection Act, which authorises the funding for anti-trafficking organisations. Its authorship is credited to Chris Smith, a Republican senator still in office.
