Child trafficking

Human trafficking is a catchall term for exploitation of immigrants. For example, immigrant child prostitution automatically counts as human trafficking. According to Customs and Border Protection, "The victim may not realize that he or she is imprisoned, because coercion is psychological (it may not be physical). Victims are typically impoverished and financially dependent on their captors. Often the crime takes place in plain view-e.g. in a restaurant, worksite, or private home-and is not immediately apparent to observers. Victims can be exploited for labor, sex, or both, particularly in private homes." Arguably, the predicament of these immigrants is partly an unintended consequence of immigration restrictions that turn millions of immigrants who are not authorized to be in the country into undocumented workers who may have trouble finding employment anywhere but in the underground economy.

According to the Trafficking Victims Protection Act, sex trafficking is the recruitment, enticement, harboring, transportation, provision, or obtaining of a person for a commercial sex act where the sex act is induced by force, fraud, restraint, threats, or coercion or where the person induced to perform the sex act is under age 18. Describing these relationships as a form of chattel slavery gives the government a justification to launch new initiatives to investigate them and to punish the older partners more harshly.

Very often the so-called "victims of human trafficking" must be forcefully restrained by their "saviors", or they will attempt to escape from their "saviors". It is quite common for those who have been "saved" and repatriated, to immediately turn around and return to either the country they were "saved" from, or another, similar country. Where they may very well be "saved" again, only to again be repatriated.

Bill Woolf of the Fairfax County Police Department and a member of the Northern Virginia Human Trafficking Task Force, "notes that victims can be rude, argumentative, and fail to self-identify as a victim. 'People then blame the youth, but you can't blame her. The reactions are due to PTSD and are a direct result of being victimized,' he continues." In other words, the opinions and preferences of the "victims" are being dismissed as merely a coping strategy or defense mechanism that arises in response to their "victimization".