The Trafficking Victims Protection Act defines “severe forms of trafficking” as:
A victim need not be physically transported from one location to another in order for the crime to fall within these definitions. Sex trafficking means the recruitment, harboring, transportation, provision, or obtaining of a person for the purpose of a commercial sex act. Commercial sex act means any sex act on account of which anything of value is given to or received by any person.
Coercion means (a) threats of serious harm to or physical restraint against any person; (b) any scheme, plan or pattern intended to cause a person to believe that failure to perform an act would result in serious harm to or physical restraint against any person; or, (c) the abuse or threatened abuse of the legal process.
Involuntary servitude includes a condition of servitude induced by means of (a) any scheme, plan, or pattern intended to cause a person to believe that, if that person did not enter into or continue in such condition, that person or another person would suffer serious harm or physical restraint; or (b) the abuse or threatened abuse of 18 the legal process.
Debt-Bondage—A common scenario in labor trafficking cases is for traffickers to promise people a good job, even benefits, in order to lure them to a new workplace. Then, the traffickers add arbitrary debt as a tool of coercion. A similar debt scheme is increasingly used to enslave women and girls in prostitution throughout the world.
Many women trafficked into prostitution report a never-ending cycle of debt—first they are charged exorbitant fees for the cost of transportation, then daily expenses are frequently added and mount up exponentially. Many women trafficked into prostitution receive no money from pimps or brothel owners. This becomes a cycle of entrapment.
In the United Kingdom, according to a leading NGO, brothel keepers and traffickers force some victims to pay debts that could range as high as $39,000 to $78,000. Commenting on patterns of abuse in prostitution of East European women in London, Detective Inspector Dick Powell from Scotland Yard told the Guardian, “Some women have sex with as many as 40 men a day. It’s very rare for her to get to keep any of the money she earns. We’ve seen places where 300 pounds ($580) a day goes to the brothel pimp or ‘madam,’ and that’s even before the woman begins to try and pay off the ‘debt bondage’ of thousands of pounds charged to bring her here.” Often, the debt can never be repaid because costs for food, rent, medicines, and condoms are added every day.
Sex trafficking is considered the largest specific subcategory of transnational modern-day slavery. Sex trafficking would not exist without the demand for commercial sex flourishing around the world.
Prostitution and related activities—including pimping and patronizing or maintaining brothels—encourage the growth of modern-day slavery by providing a façade behind which traffickers for sexual exploitation operate. Where prostitution is tolerated, there is a greater demand for human trafficking victims and always an increase in the number of women and children trafficked into commercial sex slavery.
