President Donald Trump's administration has suddenly decided to slash funding for legal representation for survivors of sex-trafficking, prompting an outcry from anti-trafficking activists, The Guardian reports.
Survivors, advocates, members of Congress and the American Bar Association have all called on the Justice Department's Office for Victims of Crime to reverse its decision to cut funding.
In 2016, a poll from the National Survivor Network found that 91 percent of those who responded has been arrested during the time they were exploited, and more than 40 percent had nine or more arrests on their record.
"It's easy to think of criminal records in stark terms — right or wrong. You do the crime, you live with the consequences of having a record. But what if you are controlled by someone else and threatened with violence — or worse, harm to your family — if you do not commit the crime?" said Nat Paul, National Survivor Network policy chair.
"In an effort to provide more essential services to a greater number of trafficking victims, the [human trafficking] solicitations were changed to focus resources on more immediate and less costly assistance, such as food, clothing, medical treatment, housing," said a representative for the Office of Justice Programs, which supervised the change in funding. "Only potentially costly direct legal representation services regarding vacatur [an order that negates a judgment or annuls proceedings] and expungement have been limited."
According to attorney Sasha Naiman, who works at the Ohio Justice and Policy Center and has represented many survivors in seeking expungement, this decision is "so startling because there is no basic understanding that you can't get access to many of these more immediate things like jobs, housing, good healthcare with a criminal record.
"The first step has to be addressing the criminalization of survivors. Without this funding many victims will simply not stand a chance of getting someone to represent them through this process."
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