Community Advocacy Drives Lasting Reform

Dismantling the cultural and criminal infrastructure of human trafficking requires a counteractive system centered on prevention, justice, and restoration. Central to this solution: carefully crafted, consistently enforced policies driven by community advocacy.

Several recently released reports on human trafficking prosecutions and policies highlight significant anti-trafficking progress, yet also reveal the policy deficiencies that frequently leave victims and the vulnerable unprotected.

Encouragingly, legislative solutions are already moving in 2026. Aided by local advocacy, these reforms can forge a path toward greater justice and restoration for victims.

Prosecution Data and Policy Trends

The newly released State Human Trafficking Report from Allies Against Slavery analyzes anti-trafficking policies and federally prosecuted human trafficking cases within each state. Collectively, this report offers insight into prosecution, enforcement of laws, and policy trends to inform and guide federal and state reforms.

Between 2003-2023, states enacted 695 human trafficking policies, as measured across 20 prevention, protection, and prosecution indicators. Overall, states prioritized prosecution policies and only in the past five years have begun increasing prevention policies.

Federal prosecution data from 2003-2022 involved over 4,500 defendants and 12,100 victims. States largely prosecute minor sex trafficking cases over adult or labor trafficking cases.

A profile of Pennsylvania’s data reveals:

• Policymakers enacted 14 human trafficking laws. While meeting minimum prosecution and protection policies, the authors found “Pennsylvania has enacted zero prevention policies, indicating an opportunity to strengthen its anti-trafficking efforts” (p. 102).

• The courts prosecuted 88 federal trafficking cases in the Commonwealth. This represented 4 percent of the national total, 178 defendants, 325 identified victims. Over 80% of these cases involved minor sex trafficking.

New data from the Pennsylvania Courts supplements this data, documenting nearly 1,500 human trafficking offenses filed across 431 state court cases between 2020 and 2024.[1]

See the chart below for more details, including the counties with the highest number of human trafficking offenses filed. Of note, half of the listed counties – and accounting for 35 percent of filed offenses – are within the southcentral region served by Greenlight Operation.

Legislative Solutions

These reports can be sobering, especially considering the notorious difficulty in identifying victims and prosecuting cases means many individuals receive neither justice nor aid. The data, however, also empowers legislative solutions.

Just this month, Congress passed the Trafficking Survivors Relief Act (TSRA), providing survivors a pathway to clear their federal criminal records.[2]

A Polaris national survivor survey found that 90 percent of survivors with a criminal record reported the charges in part/or fully resulted from their trafficking experience. A majority of victims then experienced difficulty securing employment, safe housing, continuing education, and child custody.

This bill affords victims greater protection instead of penalization – establishing a process to vacate convictions and expunge arrest records for certain criminal offenses committed as a result of their victimization.[3]

Pennsylvania can build on this moment and enact similar state-level reforms. Though making significant strides, Pennsylvania received an “F” grade from Shared Hope’s annual state report card, reinforcing the report above by highlighting needed improvements in victim protection from unjust criminalization and greater legal relief and survivor-centered approaches.

Pennsylvania lawmakers have introduced a menu of reforms. Two bills would implement similar TSRA reforms in state law:

• Senate Bill 143 (Sens. Laughlin and Dush) expands the current Safe Harbor Law to ensure children cannot be charged with any criminal offenses related to their exploitation. The bill implements alternative interventions to the juvenile justice system, attempts to address the underlying factors of children’s victimization, and enhances practices for identifying victims.

• House Bill 753 (Reps. Shusterman, Webster, and Khan) expands affirmative defense so that victims cannot be charged for any offense resulting from their trafficking. It additionally includes theft and contempt charges as eligible for vacatur and streamlines the relief process.

Collectively, these prosecution and policy reports underscore the importance of advocating for legislative reforms meant to improve detection and prosecution of human trafficking and restoration for survivors.

By publicly supporting these reforms and encouraging others to join you in contacting local policymakers, you can help push these reforms. Click here to access continuously updated resources and subscribe to our newsletter for advocacy next steps.

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[1] Of note, multiple offences can be charged in a single case and may not have resulted in convictions. For instance, offenses spiked in 2023 due to a Franklin County case with 200 human rights trafficking offenses.

[2] H.R.4323, 119th Congress (2025-2026).

[3] The bill also allocates funds for legal representation during the relief process and directs the Government Accountability Office to assess the impact of this process, including the number of human trafficking survivors who file motions to vacate convictions or expunge records.