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.
Nefarious: Merchant of Souls
The film presents human trafficking statistics and assertions from a variety of sources, prominently departments of the United States government and the United Nations. These include that human trafficking is growing faster than any other criminal industry, that the average age of those forced into prostitution in the U.S. is 13, that the commercial sexual exploitation of children victimizes almost two million children globally, that 80% of trafficked women and 50% of trafficked children are sexually exploited, that 161 UN member states engage in human trafficking, and that modern slavery has an annual revenue of —according to the film, higher than the annual revenues of Major League Baseball, the National Basketball Association, the National Football League and the National Hockey League combined. The film indicates that "trafficking is an exploitation of vulnerability" and expresses the need to "take away the stigma that [prostitutes] choose to be there." Kevin Bales of Free the Slaves is quoted as saying that there are 27 million slaves in the world. The film ends with the assertion that only Jesus can free people from sexual slavery.