Global Anti-Sex Trafficking: State Variance in Implementation of Protectionist Policies

Sex trafficking—a global issue involving a plethora of factors—has elicited persistent calls for its eradication. The early 2000s saw the international community establish a set of strategies to combat trafficking centered on protectionist, preventative, and prosecutorial methods. While the prosecutorial and preventative policies have been utilized most by states, protectionist measures for victims have been lacking. These discrepancies—which present human rights implications for victims—give rise to questions of why states may or may not implement protectionist policies. I propose that states’ effective implementation of protectionist policies is influenced not only by their respect for human rights, but also by their capability to actually carry out policy. With a novel dataset covering 166 countries over the 2000–2009 period, and using Seo-Young Cho et al.’s Protection-Score Index as the dependent variable, a range of factors potentially influencing states’ implementation of protectionist policy is assessed. Results show that states’ implementation of protectionist policies is highly influenced by a state’s world culture ties and its governance effectiveness, as well as other state-level political mechanisms. Of note, other factors considered important within previous studies, including female parliamentary participation and economic-based measures, such as GDP per capita or levels of global trade, are insignificant and illustrate little influence.