I 
112TH CONGRESS 
1ST SESSION H. R. 2982 
To amend the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968 to 
include human trafficking as a part 1 violent crime for purposes of 
the Edward Byrne Memorial Justice Assistance Grant Program. 
IN THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES 
SEPTEMBER 21, 2011 
Mr. CARTER (for himself, Mrs. SCHMIDT, Mrs. MALONEY, Mr. SMITH of New 
Jersey, Mr. DEFAZIO, Ms. NORTON, Ms. SPEIER, Mr. BLUMENAUER, Mr. 
GUTIERREZ, Mr. ADERHOLT, Ms. RICHARDSON, Mr. LONG, Mr. BILI-
RAKIS, Mr. MORAN, Mr. POE of Texas, Mr. WOLF, Mr. JACKSON of Illi-
nois, and Mr. PITTS) introduced the following bill; which was referred to 
the Committee on the Judiciary 
A BILL 
To amend the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets 
Act of 1968 to include human trafficking as a part 
1 violent crime for purposes of the Edward Byrne Memo-
rial Justice Assistance Grant Program. 
Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representa-
tives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, 
SECTION 1. SHORT TITLE. 
This Act may be cited as the ‘‘Human Trafficking 
Reporting Act’’. 
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SEC. 2. FINDINGS. 
Congress finds the following: 
(1) Human trafficking is a form of modern-day 
slavery. 
(2) According to the Trafficking Victims Pro-
tection Act of 2000 ‘‘severe forms of trafficking in 
persons’’ means— 
(A) sex trafficking in which a commercial 
sex act is induced by force, fraud, or coercion, 
or in which the person induced to perform such 
act has not attained 18 years of age; or 
(B) the recruitment, harboring, transpor-
tation, provision, or obtaining of a person for 
labor or services, through the use of force, 
fraud, or coercion for the purpose of subjection 
to involuntary servitude, peonage, debt bondage, 
or slavery. 
(3) There is an acute need for better data col-
lection of incidents of human trafficking across the 
United States in order to effectively combat severe 
forms of trafficking in persons. 
(4) The State Department’s 2011 Trafficking 
in Persons report found that— 
(A) the United States is a ‘‘source, transit 
and destination country for men, women, and 
children, subjected to forced labor, debt bond-
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age, domestic servitude and sex trafficking,’’; 
and 
(B) the United States needs to ‘‘improve 
data collection on human trafficking cases at 
the federal, state and local levels’’. 
(5) The International Organization for Migra-
tion has reported that in order to effectively combat 
human trafficking there must be reliable and stand-
ardized data, however, the following barriers for 
data collection exist: 
(A) The illicit and underground nature of 
human trafficking. 
(B) The reluctance of victims to share in-
formation with authorities. 
(C) Insufficient human trafficking data 
collection and research efforts by governments 
world-wide. 
(6) A 2009 report to the Department of Health 
and Human Services entitled Human Trafficking 
Into and Within the United States: A Review of the 
Literature found that ‘‘the data and methodologies 
for estimating the prevalence of human trafficking 
globally and nationally are not well developed, and 
therefore estimates have varied widely and changed 
significantly over time’’. 
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