SEXUAL TRAFFICKING IN THE UNITED STATES

Sexual Trafficking in the United States

Sexual Trafficking in the United States

The United States of America ranks as the world's second largest destination/market country (after Germany) for women and children trafficked for purposes of sexual exploitation in the sex industry (Mizus, Moody, Privado, & Douglas, 2003). By conservative estimates, there are 18,000 persons trafficked into the United States per year. Ninetysix percent of these are females, and almost half are children. Some estimates are as high as 50,000 persons trafficked into the United States annually. The CIA estimates that 700,000 people are trafficked annually worldwide. (Farley, 2003)

The U.S. government defines trafficking as a modern type of slavery. It is estimated that between 100,000 to 150,000 persons, mainly women and children, are kept under slavery in the United States. Slavery, again conservatively estimated, controls the lives of three million persons worldwide. Human trafficking and sexual exploitation are “part and parcel” of the larger worldwide, and exponentially increasing, slave trade. (Farley, 2003) Trafficking is slavery because it includes fraud or extortion in recruitment and coercion, restraint, gang rape, threat of physical harm, loss of liberty, and loss of self-determination on arrival in the destination industry.

Incidence of slavery, in its sex trafficking form, appears to be directly correlated with the increasing universal marginalization of women. Initially the authors believed that the issues relating to the trafficking of children would prove to be similar to those relating to the trafficking of adult women. However, after further investigation, it appears that although the logistics of international trafficking are similar for both women and children, the attendant circumstances of children in their source countries, the logistics of their travel (e.g., usually accompanied by bogus “parents”), and the milieu of a well-established commercial child sexual exploitation industry in the United States argue for a separate research agenda for each, while still admitting areas of overlap. (Farley, 2003)

The merger of the interests of criminal justicians and economists in this study should come as no surprise: Criminal justicians themselves describe the interrelated crimes of trafficking, prostitution, extortion, and slavery in economic terms. We assert that worldwide slavery and human trafficking cannot be greatly affected without changing worldwide economic convention. (Farley, 2003) Prostitution. The reader may suppose that prostitution has been in the myriad legal codes for so many years, that there would exist no question concerning precise definition.

Yet the argument has some merit, that prostitution has been euphemized by men as an occupation, which supports the myth that women logically and willingly choose prostitution over other boring and low-skilled jobs. It must be remembered that when most laws controlling prostitution were codified, only men held positions that allowed the power of definition. It should also be noted that the masculine actors, the purchasers of sexual services (who will later be referred to as factors) and pimps, receive either no or “slap on the wrist”-type sanctions. (Farley, 2003)

Twenty-five states have no statutes that sanction the behavior of those buying sexual services, whereas 9 have none sanctioning ...