Human trafficking is surging in Pennsylvania. Statistics show a significant uptick in human trafficking just in the last several years.
Republican State Representative Rob Kauffman from Chambersburg, representing the 89th district, tells Larry Richert and Kevin Battle on NewsRadio KDKA it's a growing crime that spans widely and includes selling of infants to sexual servitude and other kinds of labor.
Awareness of the issue is key, said Kauffman. He explained that hospital workers, police officers and different kinds of first responders are no being trained to recognize signs of human trafficking.
Kauffman said law enforcement officials are saying that certain laws aren't good enough to prosecute suspects and that they need sharper teeth in the laws to take down the perpetrators of human trafficking. "As policy makers in Harrisburg, that's what we're attempting to do," he explained.
"It's a crime that creates victims that, very frankly, are powerless," said Kauffman. He's spearheading the effort to deter this crime and provide protections and recourse.
Some of those ideas include expanding the rape shield law to preventing a victim's previous sexual encounters from being brought up in a trial against an accused trafficker, increasing trafficking of infant children from first degree misdemeanor to a first degree felony and adding human trafficking offenses to the list of sexual offender registries.
Kauffman's legislation would also allow for civil cases to be brought against the traffickers, not only in the place where the victim resides, but also where the crime occurred.
He says there are a total of 8 bills on his desk right now designed to fight human trafficking.