H.R. 1185 — Human Trafficking and Exploitation Prevention Training Act

This section establishes the short title of the Act as the “Human Trafficking and Exploitation Prevention Training Act.”

This section sets forth congressional findings on human trafficking, including that survivors come from all ages, backgrounds, and communities; that trafficking victims have been identified in all 50 States and the District of Columbia; that traffickers commonly recruit through intimate partners, family members, false employment offers, and social media; that children as young as age 8 are widely exposed to mobile devices and online platforms used for recruitment; that an estimated 739,000 children experience sexual abuse each year, with 12 percent to 25 percent of girls and 8 percent to 10 percent of boys victimized before age 18; and that training students, teachers, and school personnel to recognize trafficking and exploitation is necessary to improve identification and prevention.

This section establishes a demonstration project under the Public Health Service Act for the Director of the Office on Trafficking in Persons of the Administration for Children and Families to train students, teachers, and school personnel at elementary schools and secondary schools to understand, recognize, prevent, and respond to signs of human trafficking and child exploitation. As background, the project uses approved nonprofit vendors to develop or provide curricula and award grants to eligible entities to implement the training, with priority for areas with the highest prevalence of reported trafficking involving children ages 5 through 17 and areas serving at-risk, vulnerable, or underserved populations, including homeless youth, foster youth, youth in the child welfare system, and runaways. The section also requires the Director to develop a data-collection methodology that protects personally identifiable information, assist grantees in developing protocols to work with law enforcement and refer survivors and exploited children to appropriate services, and report to Congress on the number of grants, schools, trained individuals, survey results, and survivors and exploited children identified and served. It redesignates existing subsections (j) and (k) as subsections (k) and (l), respectively.