Sex trafficking
After members of Prostitutes Anonymous who were survivors of modern domestic sex trafficking spent 13 years doing TV, radio, public appearances, news interviews, etc. and calling out that this country needed to "'do something' about it" an internationally recognized definition for sex trafficking was finally established with the Trafficking Act of 2000. It was during the same year the Palermo Protocol was enacted, the United States passed the Trafficking Victims Protection Act of 2000 (TVPA) to clarify the previous confusion and discrepancies in regards to the criminalizing guidelines of human trafficking. Through this act, sex trafficking crimes were defined as a situation where in which a "commercial sex act is induced by force, fraud, or coercion, or in which the person induced to perform such act has not attained 18 years of age." If the victim is a child under the age of 18 no force, fraud, or coercion needs to be proven based on this legislation. Susan Tiefenbrun, a professor at the Thomas Jefferson School of Law who has written extensively on human trafficking, conducted research on the victims addressed in this act and discovered that each year more than two million women throughout the world are bought and sold for sexual exploitation. In order to clarify previous legal inconsistencies in regards to youth and trafficking, the United States took legal measures to define more varieties of exploitive situations in relation to children. The two terms they defined and focused on were "commercial sexual exploitation of children" and "domestic minor sex trafficking." Commercial sexual exploitation of children (CSEC) is defined as "encompassing several forms of exploitation, including pornography, prostitution, child sex tourism, and child marriage." Domestic minor sex trafficking (DMST) is a term that represents a subset of CSEC situations that have "the exchange of sex with a child under the age of 18, who is a United States (US) citizen or permanent resident, for a gain of cash, goods, or anything of value."
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.