The Fourth Annual Beyond Awareness Summit is a week from today. This two-day program is sponsored by the Demand Project, Homeland Security, the Tulsa County Sheriff’s Office, the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children and The Malouf Foundation. Laurie Koller will be speaking on What Civil Attorneys Can Do to Help Trafficked Victims. The program is open to the public so if you’d like to learn what is being done to prevent, prosecute, rescue and rehabilitate trafficking victims, sign up here.
Civil Justice should have a place at the table in the discussion about human trafficking. Most of the focus has been on the criminal justice system and training law enforcement and social services in the prevention and prosecution of human trafficking, especially sex trafficking. This is necessary in order to deter criminals or to punish them if they continue the criminal behavior.
But focusing on the crime may only address part of the problem. If there are other actors in the trafficking world who are not directly involved but facilitate the crime, then something needs to be done about them as well.
One of the primary purposes of our civil justice system (the tort case) is deterrence. If you’ve ever seen the movie A Class Action, then the idea will be familiar to you: If you make $100 profit for your product, but your product causes harm costing $90, then you will continue to market the harmful product because it is beneficial to you to do so. The civil justice system, by increasing the cost of harm, creates a deterrence effect that means the manufacturer should fix the product so profit can still be generated.
This same concept can be applied to problems in our society. For the problem of trafficking, if businesses such as hotels and sporting facilities turn a blind eye to human trafficking because it is profitable for them to do so, then the civil justice system can increase the cost of doing business with traffickers in order to deter businesses from doing so. This concept is already being implemented and likely will prove effective at deterring behavior that helps facilitate trafficking.
Increasing the cost of turning a blind eye to trafficking is one thing civil attorneys can do to help trafficked victims.
If you are interested in pursing a civil case, then contact Koller Trial Law today.
Every employee of Koller Trial Law is trauma-informed and understands the need for extreme confidentiality.
