Human Trafficking: An Introduction

Each year, more than two million women and children are victimized from sexual trafficking. Legislation pending in Congress would define "sex trafficking" as the purchase, sale, recruitment, harboring, transportation, transfer, or receipt of a person for the purposes of a commercial sex act. Trafficked women are typically acquired by kidnapping, purchase, or lured with false incentives for jobs and a better life. Once caught up in the sexual trafficking industry, women and children find themselves in situations of forced prostitution, sweatshop labor, or exploitative domestic servitude. The perpetrators of this organized crime tend to hold women and children as virtual prisoners, strip them of their passports, and hold them against their will. An increased number of children are "recruited" into such slavery because they are less likely to have diseases and, therefore, more likely to generate a larger profit.