Sex Trafficking : Why it is so hard for victims to escape, and how victims do escape

Human trafficking has turned into a global criminal industry that makes 32 billion dollars annually and enslaves about 800,000 individuals every year. Eighty per cent of those 800,000 are women or girls, and 50 per cent are minors. Individuals can be subjected to trafficking in many ways; however, the most common form of human trafficking is sex trafficking which involves sexual exploitation. Escaping sex trafficking is not easily done, and in this paper, one will get a better understanding of why it is hard. Knowledge of how girls get entrapped and enmeshed will be shown, but the most important part is showing how hard it can be to escape or what is stopping the victim; it will also show how victims escaped and what happened after they did. This paper looks further into escapes mechanisms from sex trafficking by analysing the stories of four victims of sex trafficking. Joan Reid’s research on Entrapment and Enmeshment (2014) will be used as a theory and the basis for how it is hard for victims to escape and then how they do escape. Research questions for this paper are; Which forms of entrapment did the victims in this study experience? Which forms of enmeshment did the victims in this study experience? How did the victims escape from sex trafficking, and which patterns, if any, are observable in terms of escape strategies? The stories of four victims describe how they were entrapped and enmeshed and how they later escaped. With their stories, this study wanted to investigate if they all could be placed into Reid's categories and if those categories were, therefore, all-inclusive. Most of the stories fit into some category; however, there was always at least one story that did not fit in both entrapment and enmeshment. This shows that the subject should be studied further in order to gain more information.