The Case of the Missing Case: Examining the Civil Right of Action for Human Trafficking Victims

With passage of the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act of 2003, Congress created a civil right of action for human trafficking victims, codified under 18 U.S.C. § 1595 (section 1595), that allows victims to seek civil relief against their traffickers in a U.S. district court for “damages and reasonable attorneys fees.” Yet, as this Note’s empirical research shows, trafficking victims have filed very few lawsuits under section 1595 in the four years since its creation. This stands in stark contrast to the estimated thousands of victims who are trafficked into and within the United States each year. This Note demonstrates the underutilization of section 1595 through an empirical search for and study of civil trafficking filings in U.S. district courts under this provision and illustrates three key findings on the number and composition of trafficking victims filing section 1595 claims. It continues with possible explanations for these empirical results, and then offers various policy recommendations aimed at bolstering the number of trafficking victims able and willing to file section 1595 actions—in the hopes of preventing a future with the same dearth of section 1595 claims as the present.