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**Home | Law + Policy | Trafficking + Exploitation | Myths + Misinformation | Listening to Workers | History | Sources**
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Trafficking is forced or heavily exploited labour, traffickers use force, fraud, or coercion to manipulate vulnerable people, trapping them in situations they cannot escape.
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Because minors legally cannot consent to sex, anyone under 18 selling sex is considered a trafficking victim by law.
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International Agreement for the Suppression of the White Slave Traffic (1904)
The Trafficking Victims Protection Act (2000)
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Trafficking: Explanation and Examples
Why Conflating SW and Trafficking is Harmful
The ‘Anti-Trafficking Industrial Complex’
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What Governments Don’t Want You To Know About Modern Slavery
What Governments Don’t Want You To Know About Modern Slavery
The Trap Investigates how prisons and jails across the US have essentially become recruiting grounds for traffickers and pimps.
Modern Day Slaves of Thailand Discusses the labour trafficking in the Thai fishing industry.
Modern Day Slaves of Thailand Discusses the labour trafficking in the Thai fishing industry.
Groomed: A National Scandal Highlights how conflating sexual exploitation with sex work or ‘prostitution’ harms victims, and how intersections of poverty, trauma, and failing social institutions play a major role in creating vulnerable children.
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Sex Work is legally defined as the consensual exchange of sexual services between adults for payment.
Trafficking is legally defined as involving force, fraud, or coercion, or any commercial sex act involving a minor.
Conflating sex work with sex trafficking directly harms trafficking victims by making them harder to identify, support, and protect. When authorities make assumptions about the industry, real victims, those who are being forced or coerced, are often overlooked or misclassified.
This leads to misguided enforcement efforts that target consensual sex workers rather than focusing on situations of actual exploitation. As a result, trafficking victims may be arrested, detained, or deported instead of being offered help. Many are afraid to come forward, especially if they’re migrants, because they risk being treated as criminals rather than survivors.
Meanwhile, due to the moral panic surrounding sex-trafficking specifically, labour trafficking in other sectors like agriculture, domestic work, or construction receives far less attention, leaving victims in those industries even more invisible.
This confusion also undermines trust: when survivors don’t fit the expected image or refuse to call themselves victims, they may be ignored or denied services.
Ultimately, equating all sex work with trafficking shifts the focus away from coercion and consent, and makes it harder to find and support the people who need help the most.
Public discussions of trafficking are often presented as neutral efforts to identify exploitation. In reality, the people most likely to be labelled “potential trafficking victims” are frequently those who are already poor, migrant, racialised, or otherwise marginalised. The result is a system that often mistakes poverty, migration and difference for evidence of trafficking while overlooking coercion in less visible settings.
Popular narratives frequently imagine sex work as a continuum running from wealthy, privileged workers at one end to trafficked victims at the other. High-end escorts, strippers and OnlyFans creators are viewed as exercising choice, while street-based workers, brothel workers and migrants are imagined as existing under coercion. Poverty and class positioning itself becomes treated as evidence of exploitation.
The reality is more complex. Most sex workers are not trafficked. Trafficking is a distinct phenomenon defined by coercion, force, threats, fraud and the inability to leave safely. Poverty, debt, homelessness, migration status and lack of employment options can increase vulnerability to exploitation, but they do not determine whether someone is trafficked. Equally, trafficking can occur among people who appear wealthy, successful or socially privileged. Class may shape vulnerability, but it does not determine consent.
Many so-called trafficking “red flags” are not indicators of trafficking at all. Limited English, shared accommodation, sending money home, relying on translators, carrying cash, using informal work networks, or even things as trivial as acrylic nails or cooking with a hotpot often are labelled ‘red flags’ for trafficking. Rather than identifying coercion, these indicators frequently identify people who are not white or not citizens.
This matters because anti-trafficking interventions are not merely descriptive; they have material consequences. When migration and poverty are treated as evidence of trafficking, anti-trafficking policy can become difficult to distinguish from immigration enforcement. Raids, surveillance, detention and deportation are often justified in the language of rescue and protection. Meanwhile, exploitation occurring in private homes, elite social networks, corporate environments, online platforms or other less visible settings may receive far less scrutiny.
The overlap between structural vulnerability and trafficking is important, but it should not be misunderstood. Lack of access to employment, exclusion from welfare systems, insecure immigration status, debt, discrimination and fear of authorities can increase a person’s vulnerability to exploitation. These conditions deserve attention because they create the circumstances in which coercion can flourish. Yet they are not themselves evidence of trafficking.
Not Your Rescue Project: Migrant Sex Workers Fighting For Justice by Chanelle Gallant and Elene Lam, Chaper 5 Excerpt
The anti-trafficking industrial complex refers to the network of governments, police agencies, immigration authorities, NGOs, charities, consultants, researchers, and international organisations that have emerged around the issue of human trafficking. Critics argue that trafficking is no longer simply a social problem being addressed by institutions; it has become an industry in itself, supporting thousands of jobs, grants, contracts, conferences, training programmes, awareness campaigns, and specialised enforcement units. As with concepts such as the prison-industrial complex, the argument is not necessarily that individual participants are acting in bad faith, but that the entire institutions develop a material interest in the continued expansion of the scale of the issue they are tasked with addressing.
The system functions through a flow of public and charitable money. Governments allocate funding to anti-trafficking initiatives through grants, contracts, law enforcement budgets, border security programmes, victim services, public awareness campaigns, and international aid. This money is then distributed to a range of actors: police task forces investigate trafficking offences, immigration agencies receive resources for border enforcement and victim identification, NGOs provide support services and run awareness campaigns, while consultants, trainers, researchers, and private contractors are paid to produce reports, training materials, risk assessments, and policy recommendations. At every stage, organisations must demonstrate that trafficking remains a significant and urgent problem in order to justify continued funding.
Critics argue that this creates a system in which resources often flow more readily towards identifying, policing, studying, and publicising trafficking than towards addressing its underlying causes. While trafficking is frequently presented as a problem of criminal predators exploiting victims, many of the factors that make people vulnerable to exploitation - poverty, insecure immigration status, lack of labour rights, housing insecurity, and limited economic opportunities - receive comparatively less attention and funding. The result, critics contend, is a self-reinforcing cycle: trafficking generates funding, funding sustains institutions, institutions produce reports and campaigns highlighting trafficking, and those reports are then used to justify further funding, even when the structural conditions that enable exploitation remain largely unchanged.