Sex Trafficking: A Global Perspective

Global estimates of human trafficking range from 600,000 to four million victims each year with the majority being victims of sex trafficking. This strikingly large range belies the difficulty in gathering, defining, and accountability of sex-trafficking data. Victims of sex trafficking may be forced into pornography, prostitution for the military or militia, spousal prostitution, and prostitution for the sex-tourism industry. In response to the problem of sex trafficking, many nations have either misunderstood the definition or failed to comprehend the magnitude that have occurs within their borders. The United Nations has defined "human trafficking" as "the recruitment, transfer, harboring or receipt of persons by threat or use of force." Similarly, the U.S. State Department's Trafficking Victims Protection Act 2000 describes severe forms of trafficking as: (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 an act has not attained 18 years of age; or (b) the recruitment, harboring, transportation, 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.