The Center’s work to combat trafficking of women and girls into the United States is a crucial part of its advocacy for women’s human rights.  As a major destination country for traffickers, the United States federal government and all 50 states must craft domestic responses to this global human rights crisis.

Each year thousands of women and girls are trafficked into the United States, where they are held in involuntary servitude for forced labor and sexual exploitation.

In many ways, the Center’s work on trafficking is the 21st stage of our founders’ early policy leadership in the 1970s – which defined violence against women and girls as a public policy issue at a time when it was considered a personal problem in the private sphere and not relevant to the public sphere. 

To a great extent, the Center’s success depends on our national network of state legislators who participate in the Contract with Women of the USA® State Legislators Initiative. In fact, graduates of the Center’s Foreign Policy Institute for State Legislators have sponsored most of the anti-trafficking legislation that states have enacted.

US PACT Clearinghouse

The US PACT Clearinghouse includes:

• Interactive map of the United States with information on state policies and federal prosecutions on international human trafficking into the United States
• Searchable annotated bibliography that includes an extensive collection of government publications, academic journals, non-governmental reports and books. This resource is currently in the process of being updated and will be available in early 2009.