Rob Portman: “I rise today during Human Trafficking Awareness Week to talk about the scourge of human trafficking, and, specifically…”

“I rise today during Human Trafficking Awareness Week to talk about the scourge of human trafficking, and, specifically, about an investigation that the Senate has just concluded that matters to every single State represented in this Chamber and to every American. We are told now that human trafficking, including sex trafficking, is a $150 billion a year industry. That makes it the second largest criminal enterprise in the world, behind the drug trade. Unfortunately, it is happening in all of our States, including my home State of Ohio. It is growing as a problem. A couple of weeks ago, two people were arrested in my home town of Cincinnati in connection with sex trafficking. Police charged a women with luring an underage girl to commit a sex act with a 56-year-old man. That was just 2 weeks after police in Blue Ash, OH, just up the road, broke up what they said was a sex trafficking ring at a hotel. Police said that two men and two women rented two rooms at a hotel, paying cash, and forced four different women to perform sex acts. The women were given crack cocaine and heroin, presumably to keep them dependent on their traffickers. This is what I am hearing back home a lot when I talk to victims of sex trafficking. Typically, drugs are involved. In Ohio, it is usually heroin. These cases are alarming, and, unfortunately, we have reasons to believe that the problem is getting worse not better.…”