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 Middle East
One of the major forces driving human trafficking in the Middle East is the large influx of foreign migration. Research conducted in 1996 on the routes of illegal migration, smuggling and trafficking concluded that over the period 1992-97, the majority of illegal migrants to Europe had originated from Iraq, China, Pakistan, India or Africa. The International Organization for Migration (IOM) notes trafficking of women from Ghana to Lebanon, Libya and EU countries, women for domestic service from Central and West Africa to Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, and even voluntary migrations of women from Ethiopia to the Middle East, where working conditions are considered to be virtual slavery. The Middle East is a destination region for men and women trafficked for the purpose of commercial and sexual exploitation. Wealthy Arab men from the Persian Gulf area have been known to rent flats that are ‘furnished with housemaids’ for anywhere from a few hours to a few months. Most of the prostitutes and human trafficking victims tend to be from Ethiopia, Nigeria, and Pakistan. Very few countries in the Middle East are devoid of the commercial sex industry.