November 2007

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(11-09-07) Senior Fellow Margaret MacDonnell issued analysis on the Trafficking Victims Protection Act re-authoritzation for 2007 (H.R. 3887) and reveals that the proposed Bill will not protect children as proponents contend. Moreover, even when the Bill appears to move foward in certain respects, conflicting provision and ill-considered drafting will render the entire framework mired in confusion. Get her report here.

November 2007

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(11-06-07) The Renewal Forum released today a unique survey of state by state legislation studying their effectiveness in dealing with human trafficking. The majority of U.S. States received an "F" in this regard. The best of these state laws (Illinois) received a grade of B-. Only four others received a C- or better. For the full text of the Renewal Forum Report, see it posted here (pdf format).

September 2007

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(9-23-07) Renewal Forum President Steve Wagner refutes analysis and conclusions by Washington Post A-1 story, " Human Trafficking Evokes Outrage, Little Evidence". "This story's conclusion might be justified if we could say that the federal government has made every effort to find victims of trafficking, but this is not the case" Wagner said. Wagner and other leaders in the human trafficking field were quoted in the Post's story.

The Renewal Forum notes that early estimates of social pathologies, like human trafficking, historically understate the extent of the problem. For example, when C. Henry Kemp authored the seminal “Battered Child Syndrome” in 1962 on child abuse, he speculated that there were perhaps 10,000 cases per year in the U.S. Last year, HHS put the number at nearly one million. For the full text of the Renewal Forum response to the Washington Post, visit our blog post here.

August 2007

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Margaret MacDonnell, Senior Fellow

Margaret MacDonnell has worked on trafficked and refugee children’s policy issues for the past five years. She has managed a national training and technical assistance program on child trafficking and has provided guidance on dozens of trafficked children’s cases to service providers, law enforcement, and victim advocates. In addition to placing trafficked children with specialized, long-term foster care programs, she has provided technical assistance to those programs and training on topics related to trafficked and refugee children. She has conducted research on human trafficking, planned service programs for trafficked children, and published articles on this topic.