Attorney general focuses on US human trafficking
The concept of human trafficking used to be foreign to Alan Wilson.
For the South Carolina attorney general, it mainly brought to mind Eastern Europeans abducting Liam Neeson’s daughter in the movie “Taken.”
“I loved the movie. Watching Liam Neeson kick some Eastern European butt — I’m all for it,” Wilson said.
But the movie, he said, “cemented in me a belief that human trafficking doesn’t happen here.”
That is, until he went to an attorneys general conference and heard a regular, upper-middle-class Michigan woman tell her story of being raped and trafficked. For two years, she was blackmailed into sneaking out of her house after her parents went to sleep and was rented out for sexual acts several times a week.
The seriousness and proximity of the issue hit home for Wilson.
“I thought, ‘This isn’t Liam Neeson’s daughter in Eastern Europe,’” he said. “‘This is a real person.’”
As a result, Wilson pushed to tighten South Carolina’s regulations on trafficking and gangs, among other initiators of crime. He said the government has “come a long way” in its prosecution of those types of crime.
Criminal justice and pre-law students went to Alpha Phi Sigma honor society’s event to hear Wilson speak, hoping to collect two relatively painless points of extra credit for attending.
Most didn’t bargain they’d be on the edge of their seats.
He acknowledged with a grin the reason Gambrell Hall Auditorium was full Thursday night, but rather than giving a dry lecture about the functions and duties of his office, he spent his half hour telling stories about his experiences in his two years as the state’s top public lawyer and how they’ve impacted him.
He used the ethics case of Lt. Gov. Ken Ard — which his office prosecuted this year — to stress the need for South Carolina’s newly founded Public Integrity Unit, which he said would be able to hold everyone in state government “from the governor to the dog catcher” accountable.
“It’s one of the largest, most critical reforms in the criminal justice system today,” Wilson said.
He took questions, encouraged students to apply for internships in his office and closed with one more example of why he believes his job is so crucial.
He told the tale of a case he prosecuted, in which a 19-year-old had been repeatedly sexually abused by her grandfather. Her sobbing reaction to her grandfather’s guilty verdict impressed upon him the importance of his job.
“I said, ‘Why are you crying? We won,’” Wilson said. “She realized she was free.”