By Robert T. Muller, Psychology Today, March 11, 2020
When she was a young girl, Danielle (name changed) was recruited into domestic sex trafficking from her long-term foster home. She was only able to leave this life once her mother regained custody of her.
Sex trafficking, a term used to describe the phenomenon of individuals performing commercial sex through the use of force, fraud, or coercion, is an epidemic. It affects about 25 million people globally. The US-based National Human Trafficking Hotline received 6,244 calls of domestic sex trafficking cases in 2017. Because of the difficulty in obtaining precise information, it is likely that the number affected is higher.
A common misconception about sex trafficking is that it is fundamentally a trans-border phenomenon—that the victim must have been moved from one country to another for the event to be considered trafficking. This is not the case. While both domestic and international sex trafficking share the feature of forcibly relocating an individual so that the person might perform commercial sex, domestic sex trafficking occurs within the borders of the victim’s country, and sometimes within their own community.
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