Sex Trafficking

Sex trafficking is a medium of modern slavery in which people perform commercial sex through the use of fraud, force, and coercion. It is a crime and a huge offense to the laws the U.S. has set in place as a nation. Approximately 4.5 million people are victims of this crime a year; close to 800,000 of those people reside within the U.S. borders. Men and women under the age of 18 engaging in commercial sex are considered to be victims of human trafficking, regardless of the use of force, fraud, or coercion. Sex traffickers frequently target weak, desperate, and naive victims and then use violence, threats, lies, debt bondage, or other forms of control and manipulation to keep victims involved in the sex industry for their own profit. Many of these criminals have been known to lure in their prey with acts of love or attention to the effect that some victims can remain blind to their afflictions and enslavement for long periods of time.

Because of these issues, the Department of State (2000) created an act
These different settings make it difficult for individuals to recognize the red flags of their surroundings. However, recent studies prove that technology, which often fuels the crime, may soon become an even greater deterrent. In fact, Kreyling (2011) held an experiment in the northwest regions of the united states and found that technology can be used to accurately track, identify, and deter human trafficking activities. Similarly, Ibanez (2014) helped to apply network analysis to domestic human trafficking activity through tests and research. These tests were administered in online environments to find circuits and indicators of trafficking in advertisements posted on open sources and also to procure movement