From here:
Arturo Perez and Jesus Garcia are charged with promoting prostitution and trafficking for sexual servitude after police said they would make the 22-year-old from Mexico City have sex with up to seven men a day.
To make her obey investigators said they would stab and cut the young woman with an ice pick and threaten to kill her family.
“It is serious enough that for the first time ever we’re using the sexual servitude statute to charge these two individuals,” Metro police spokesperson Don Aaron told News 2. …
For the first time ever, these police decided to use the sexual servitude statute to charge the alleged offenders. I wonder how many times they didn’t think forced prostitution was “serious enough” to do so.
–Ann Bartow
It was not a matter of police not thinking forced prostitution was”serious enough”before. Tennessee simply didn’t have a human trafficking/slavery law until quite recently and this was the first case tried under the new law. Because the case was tried on the local level, even though the young woman had been trafficked and sold for three years, only the few months since the law was enacted could be prosecuted so the perps got only an 8 year sentence with only six months in jail!! The Feds decided for some reason unknown to me, not to take the case, even though the woman said she would testify and the perpetrators pleaded guilty I certainly would like some answers on why that is.