Sex Work vs. Trafficking: Understanding the Difference

By Melissa Ditmore, RH Reality Check. Posted May 10, 2008.

There are big differences between women trafficked into
sexual slavery and voluntary sex workers. So why are we treating them the same?
Even those who mean well sometimes confuse the human rights abuse of
trafficking in persons with the human occupation of prostitution, or sex work.
It's understandable because of the history of the two fields, but it creates
rather than solves problems. Let me try to sort it out here.
The tendency to treat trafficking and prostitution as if they were the same
thing has a long and problematic history. Legislation and social discussion
have often blurred or denied any difference, but that has always made things
worse rather than better for those involved.
The trafficking of women and children into sexual slavery is undeniably a
gross abuse of human rights. Like all trafficking, it involves coercion or
trickery or both. Sex trafficking is an odious forms of trafficking, but it is
far from the only one. Men, women and children are also -- and more commonly --
trafficked routinely for purposes of household and farm labor as well as
sweatshop manufacturing. Their lives may be less media-genic than those of sex
trafficking victims, but they are no less brutal, dangerous and degraded.
A narrow focus on the single aspect of sex trafficking is often fueled by
sensationalist and sometimes salacious accounts of sexual abuse. It leads us to
ignore these other forms of trafficking, and so denies help and protection to
all the men, women and children forced into and trapped in abusive working
situations in other industries.
By the same token, treating sex work as if it is the same as sex trafficking
both ignores the realities of sex work and endangers those engaged in it. Sex
workers include men and women and transgender persons who offer sexual services
in exchange for money. The services may include prostitution (sexual
intercourse) and other services such as phone sex. Sex workers engage in this
for many reasons, but the key distinction here is that they do it voluntarily.
They are not coerced or tricked into staying in the business but have chosen
this from among the options available to them.
A key goal of sex worker activists is to improve sex-working conditions, but
self-organization is impossible when sex work is regarded as merely another
form of slavery. Then authorities and laws trying to stop true slavery --
trafficking -- get misapplied to sex workers, clients and others involved in
the sex industry. Law enforcement raids in the U.S. and abroad, for example, have
led to little success identifying trafficked persons but instead have driven
sex work underground. This exposes sex workers to an increased risk of violence
and denies them any protection of laws against assault or access to medical,
legal and educational services. It denies them their human rights.
A national anti-trafficking law enacted in 2000 recognizes "severe
forms of trafficking" as a modern form of slavery that involves a broad
spectrum of workers and industries. In this interpretation, trafficking is
clearly distinguished from voluntary sex work and thus avoids the absurdity of
equating the fear and suffering of a trafficked person with the typical working
conditions of voluntary sex workers. These conditions are often far from ideal,
but nevertheless they are far removed from debt bondage or enslavement.