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."
Maritime security operations
Slavery also known as human trafficking in modern days is the act of forcing some type of labor or sexual act upon someone. As the years go by the number of men, women, and children being trafficking are significantly large, this is happening around the world including the United States. Human trafficking comes second to drug trafficking generating billions of dollars per year. This crime is hard to follow up due to the victim's language and fear to the traffickers and law enforcement. The Department of the Navy (DoN) and the Department of Defense (DoD) along with other offices have come together to fight and ensure that the Combating Trafficking in the Persons (CTIP) policies are properly implemented and integrated. In the month of January 2017, the SDPD was able to arrest 38 men involved with human trafficking during an undercover operation. Even though the Coast Guard and the Navy were not involved in this operation, they also have operations similar to drug trafficking.