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 Middle East
Most commonly, but not exclusively, human trafficking is exploitation in the form of forced prostitution or sexual enslavement. State authorities have typically confused sex trafficking with prostitution. Some young impoverished women are attracted to the sex industry because it appears to offer quick and easy money. Traffickers often lure desperate young women with the promise of a better paying job or higher education into a destination country where their documentation and passports are forcibly taken from them as soon as they arrive. These women often find themselves in slave-like situations. Once trafficked into the sex industry, traffickers control the women through physical and psychological means. Prostitution in the Middle East is strictly illegal, along with all sexual activity outside lawful marriage. The religious outlawing of extramarital sex reinforces this trade and consequently further bolsters the demand for prostitution. The issue is exacerbated by the lack of legislative actions taken by states to control prostitution and trafficking.