4 ideas
The US-led anti-trafficking regime folds migration, labour exploitation and sex work into one category of 'trafficking', so any migrant woman in commercial sex is read as a victim of force. Because the category is built around sexual victimhood, the more common abuses in construction and domestic work, such as wage theft, confiscated passports and confinement, go unrecognized.
Raids on sex workers, carried out partly to show compliance with external rankings like the US Trafficking in Persons report, lead mainly to detention and deportation. The women lose their income, debts and remittance obligations go unpaid, and many are pushed into riskier, more hidden arrangements. In this sense 'rescue' works as a form of state violence against the people it names as victims.
Rather than seeing migrant women as passive victims, this lens treats them as actors making strategic choices among bad options. Some move between domestic work, service jobs and sex work depending on pay, autonomy and risk. What looks like victimization from outside may be a calculated escape from a worse labour situation.
The kafala sponsorship system ties a migrant's legal residency to a single employer. That dependence lets employers withhold passports and wages, and it makes a worker who leaves an abusive job 'illegal' overnight. The vulnerability comes from the legal structure itself, not from individual traffickers, so targeting traffickers leaves the machinery of exploitation intact.