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 work
Ambiguity in the law allowed for prostitutes to challenge imprisonment in the courts. Through these cases prostitutes forced a popular recognition of their profession and defended their rights and property. Despite sex workers efforts, social reformers looking to abolish prostitution outright began to gain traction in the early 20th century. New laws focused on the third-party businesses where prostitution took place, such as saloons and brothels, holding the owners culpable for the activities that happened within their premises. Red-light districts began to close. Finally, in 1910 the Mann Act, or "White Slave Traffic Act" made illegal the act of coercing a person into prostitution or other immoral activity, the first federal law addressing prostitution. This act was created to address the trafficking of young, European girls who were thought to have been kidnapped and transported to the United States to work in brothels, but criminalized those participating in consensual sex work. Subsequently, at the start of the First World War, a Navy decree forced the closure of sex-related businesses in close proximity to military bases. Restrictions and outright violence led to the loss of the little control workers had over their work. In addition to this, in 1918, the Chamberlain-Kahn Act made it so that any woman found to have a sexually transmitted disease (STD) would be quarantined by the government. The original purpose of this act was to stop the spread of venereal diseases among U.S. soldiers. By 1915 under this act, prostitutes, or those perceived to be prostitutes could be stopped, inspected, and detained or sent to a rehabilitation facility if they were found to test positive for any venereal disease. During the World War I, an estimate 30,00 women were detained and examined. The state had made sex workers into legal outcasts. During the Great Depression, black women in New York City accounted for more than 50 percent of arrests for prostitution.