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52 Wake Forest L. Rev. 435 (2017)
Criminalizing Buyers under Child Sex-Trafficking Laws as a Critical Protection for Child Victims

handle is hein.journals/wflr52 and id is 451 raw text is: CRIMINALIZING BUYERS UNDER CHILD SEX- TRAFFICKING LAWS AS A CRITICAL PROTECTION FOR CHILD VICTIMS Christine M. Raino* INTRODUCTION Otherwise, society will continue to label certain kids as child prostitutes or teen prostitutes as opposed to victims. With such labels that imply choice and fault, these victims are often ignored, arrested, or otherwise misidentified.1 Across the nation, many states are shifting to the hard work of legislating specific protections for child sex-trafficking victims. Meanwhile, a threshold barrier to victim identification persists in state sex-trafficking statutes, threatening to undermine these emerging efforts on behalf of child victims. That barrier is the way states are defining child sex trafficking. As a nation, we are not using the same definition of child sex trafficking, and when the definition does not reflect the full scope of minor sex-trafficking victims, vulnerable youth are excluded not only from the definition of victim but from the very protections that are being developed to help stop the cycle of exploitation.2 * Director of Public Policy, Shared Hope International. Thanks to Sarah Bendtsen, J.D., and Sarah Breyer, Esq., for their research assistance and to the Wake Forest Law Review at Wake Forest University School of Law for convening this Symposium on human trafficking. Special thanks to Rachel Harper, Esq., former Shared Hope International Policy Counsel, for her contributions as coauthor of Shared Hope International's policy research on the issue of third-party control, which provided foundational research for this Article. 1. HOLLY AUSTIN SMITH, WALKING PREY: How AMERICA'S YOUTH ARE VULNERABLE TO SEX SLAVERY 14 (2014). 2. See Amanda Peters, Reconsidering Federal and State Obstacles to Human Trafficking Victim Status and Entitlements, 2016 UTAH L. REV. 535, 548 (2016) (Victim labels qualify or disqualify individuals from receiving victim services. A person's right to be called a 'human trafficking victim' is directly connected to the entitlements the victim receives. (footnote omitted)); id. at 554 (Entitlements earmarked for trafficking victims are inaccessible for individuals who cannot prove their status to the gatekeepers of trafficking benefits, 435