Separate routes, similar crimes? Conceptualising differences between domestic and international sex traffickers in the United States

Sex trafficking constitutes a severe international issue, affecting 4.8 million victims worldwide, with those affected in the United States numbering in the thousands (Global Slavery Index, 2016; International Labour Office, 2017) This paper aimed to increase the current literature available on sex traffickers in the United States. It examined a sample of 114 criminally prosecuted cases of sex trafficking obtained through the Case Law Database within the Human Trafficking Knowledge Portal provided by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. The study sought specifically to explore differences between domestic and international sex traffickers in the United States with regards to a) the type of victim selected, b) the makeup of their operation, c) their methods of victim recruitment and d) the tools of control they employ. Overall, findings demonstrated that domestic and international sex traffickers did differ significantly from one another with respect to all four of these parameters