I think it would help if they stopped calling it "human trafficking" and "forced sex labor" and called it for what it is: the buying and selling of slaves. Bringing sex into the issue is muddying the water about what a large segment of Americans is doing. These people are slavers, plain and simple.
Need I remind American law enforcement, politicians, media, and the electorate at large that slavery is illegal in the United States of America?
I note that the term "industry" in the title isn't mine; I took it from the following report by Fox News. The report is the last in a six-part series based on two months of investigative reporting by Fox. You can see their previous five television segments and articles here: One, Two, Three, Four, and Five.
Also, I posted only the highlights in the report, omitting much information on what U.S. law enforcement is doing to combat slave trafficking in America, which frankly is a drop in the bucket and will remain so until Americans confront the fact that they are supporting wide-scale slavery -- not only in the USA but in countries, notably Mexico and Phillipines, which supply many of the slaves shipped to American customers. But as you will see from the Fox report, it's the internal slave trade in the U.S. that is responsible for much of the slave business in America.
Yet a large internal slave trade is surely mirrored in other countries where slavery is routine; it's just that America, with the world's third largest population, is the worst-case situation for a vaunted advanced democracy.
Human trafficking in America among worst in world: reportBy Andrew Keiper and Perry Chiaramonte
June 23, 2019
Fox News [H/T Drudge Report]
The United States is again ranked as one of the worst countries in the world for human trafficking. According to a recently released report by the State Department, the top three nations of origin for victims of human trafficking in 2018 were the United States, Mexico and the Philippines.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo delivered the Trafficking in Persons report, which is created annually by the State Department to document human trafficking in the year prior, and highlighted the growing focus that government agencies and nonprofit organizations have dedicated to stopping human trafficking.
The Department of Justice provided more than $31 million for 45 victim service providers that offered services to trafficking survivors across the country. It was a demonstrable increase; the DOJ only provided $16 million to 18 organizations in 2017, according to the report.
At the heart of the human trafficking trade in America is simple economics: Supply and demand.
[...]
“We have a major issue here in the United States” Geoff Rogers, co-founder of the United States Institute Against Human Trafficking (USIAHT), said in an interview with Fox News. “The United States is the No. 1 consumer of sex worldwide. So we are driving the demand as a society.”
[...]
“We're also driving the demand with our own people, with our own kids,” Rogers said. “So there are tremendous numbers of kids, a multitude of kids that are being sold as sex slaves today in America. These are American kids, American-born, 50 percent to 60 percent of them coming out of the foster care industry.”
This assertion is confirmed by the State Department’s report, which found that children in foster care, homeless youth, undocumented immigrant children and those with substance abuse problems were especially at risk to fall into the human trafficking trap.
Rogers says that because the demand is so great in the U.S., traffickers are filling that demand with an increased supply of forced sex workers.
“So the demand here in the United States is a global one,” he said. “We do have men traveling the globe to go to places like Thailand and other places in East Asia to purchase sex with kids. But, in fact, the demand is so great that the supply has needed to be filled here in the United States.”
“Because of the demand, then these traffickers are filling that demand with supply. And the demand is so great here in the United States that they're filling the supply with our very own kids,” Rogers continued.
[...]********
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