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.
Sex workers' rights
Opponents of the sex workers' rights movement, such as Melissa Farley and Janice Raymond, argue that prostitution should be abolished because legalization can increase incidences of human trafficking. The "New UN Trafficking Protocol" by Raymond argues that many victims are trafficked to countries in which sex work is legalized or decriminalized, and because they are trafficked under the guise of migrants they are not protected. Raymond also argues that it is impossible to separate the exploitation experienced by local prostitutes from the exploitative experiences of trafficked prostitutes, as they are very similar. Thus, to end sex slavery, the report declares that everyone involved in sex work needs to be criminalized so that the industry can be abolished. Similarly, Farley argues that engagement in voluntary sex work is a decision made by women in the absence of alternative choices, and that it therefore cannot accurately be described as a voluntary and freely made choice.