The Biden administration this month established The National Advisory Committee on the Trafficking of Children and Youth, which is in actuality a continuation of a body by the same name that was created in 2014 child welfare legislation.
The committee is meant to advise the executive branch on the the commercial exploitation of children in the United States, including the more well-known scourge of sex trafficking and the lesser-recognized problem of labor trafficking. See the brief TedX remarks in the video below by Kara Napolitano of the Laboratory to Combat Human Trafficking to get a sense of the scope and spread of the problem.
The Secretary of Health and Human Services will select the committee “in consultation with” the Department of Justice, whatever that means. It can include no more than 25 people and it must include at least one survivor of labor trafficking and one survivor of sex trafficking.
The original committee, which sunsetted in 2022, was established as part of the Preventing Sex Trafficking and Strengthening Families Act in 2014. The bill also established requirements that states start to report the number of failed adoptions each year, and limiting the use of long-term foster care as an acceptable path for older youth in the system.
