Intimate Partner Violence and Human Trafficking

There is no single profile of a trafficking victim. Victims of human trafficking can be anyone—regardless of race, color, national origin, disability, religion, age, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, socioeconomic status, education level, or citizenship status. Human trafficking, also known as trafficking in persons or modern-day slavery, is a crime that involves compelling or coercing a person to provide labor or services, or to engage in commercial sex acts.  The coercion can be subtle or overt, physical or psychological.  Exploitation of a minor for commercial sex is human trafficking, regardless of whether any form of force, fraud, or coercion was used. 

IPV is also believed to be a key precursor to the victimization of women and girls in the human sex trafficking trade, in which the average age of victims is 13 in the United States. Sex trafficking is defined by the Trafficking Victims Protection Act of 2000 as: “the recruitment, harboring, transportation, provision, obtaining, patronizing, or soliciting of a person for the purpose of a commercial sex act.”  One youth assessment performed in Tennessee in 2006 and 2007 indicated that 55 percent of the surveyed victims of sex trafficking were identified as “foster care youth from group homes”. Still, health care providers frequently fail to recognize these patients, and in a recent Kaiser Health News Survey, 88 percent of survivors of sex trafficking said that while they were being trafficked they had contact with a health care provider, typically someone in an emergency department.