Migrant sex work
Sex work and sex trafficking conflation is also a heavily debated legal topic. Several scholars argue that existing legal provisions aimed at combating human trafficking, such as the U.S. Trafficking Victims Protection Act and the 2000 United Nations Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, especially Women and Children, do not adequately account for the variety of sex worker conditions and contexts, voluntary or involuntary. For instance, Filipina hostesses who migrate to Japan to work as entertainers must give up their legal documents to their recruiters during the migration process. While the law considers the process of giving up a passport to a third party intermediary as a condition of human trafficking, several scholars, activists, and the sex workers themselves do not regard this to be human trafficking, particularly when individuals consent to this component of the migration process.
Human trafficking in the Dominican Republic
Dominican men and women have been subjected to sex forced labor in the United States and Argentina. Most trafficked victims are sent to Western Europe, and some are sent to North America. Out of all areas in the Caribbean, the Dominican Republic has the highest amount of trafficked persons; women are trafficked to Costa Rica and Panama as well as to Western Europe. There are over one thousand Dominican commercial sex workers in Spain and 3,675 in Switzerland. While the Ministry of Labor reported that sugar plantations no longer use child labor, the sugar industry has been cited as vulnerable for possible use of forced labor. A 2009 NGO study found of some 500 male Haitian construction workers interviewed, 21 percent reported experiencing forced labor in the Dominican Republic at some point, although not in their current jobs as construction workers. However, the December 2014 "List of Goods Produced by Child Labor or Forced Labor" reported 5 agricultural goods produced under such working conditions in the Dominican Republic, all of them involving child labor and one involving both child labor and forced labor. Street children and undocumented or stateless Haitian people – including the Dominican-born children and grandchildren of Haitian migrants – were vulnerable groups to trafficking. Child sex tourism is a problem, particularly in coastal resort areas, with child sex tourists arriving year-round from various countries.