The lack of political will is partially the result of empty threats from the international community, but most of it can be attributed to deeper economic forces and sociological factors at play.
[2] In her article in "Global Tides," Stephanie Doe states that sex trafficking is a sensitive topic in the Middle East for various reasons.
Consequently, if the government was to acknowledge sex trafficking as a problem, it could be interpreted as alluding to the state's diminishing power.
[2] In 2003, a study published in the Journal of Trauma Practice found that 89 percent of women in prostitution wanted to escape.
Today slavery typically involves women and children being sold into involuntary servitude by the means of violence and deprivation.
There is a clear lack of labor protection laws for domestic workers in the GCC (Gulf Cooperation Council) countries.
Many migrant people, mainly from Asian states, are tricked into coming to the Middle East, where they find themselves in a forced labor situation or working for very low wages.
The forced labor of migrant workers is especially prevalent in the oil-rich Persian Gulf states of Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates.
Traffickers often lure desperate young women with the promise of a better paying job or higher education into a destination country where their documentation and passports are forcibly taken from them as soon as they arrive.
Boys from Bangladesh, India and Pakistan are recruited around five years of age to be camel jockeys in Middle Eastern countries such as the United Arab Emirates.
Their parents normally sell them to agents who go around poor districts in these countries and offer to take male children away to the UAE to work.
[4] One of the major forces driving human trafficking in the Middle East is the large influx of foreign migration.
[8] The Middle East is a destination region for men and women trafficked for the purpose of commercial and sexual exploitation.
Wealthy Arab men from the Persian Gulf area have been known to rent flats that are ‘furnished with housemaids’ for anywhere from a few hours to a few months.
Economic vulnerability increases the likelihood of women becoming sexual commodities for wealthy Arabs in the Persian Gulf area.
For example, in Egypt, women from lower-class backgrounds see that a few nights in prostitution generates more money than one month's work in the public sector.
The proliferation of prostitution, sex tourism, and misyar marriages can be understood as the consequence of uneven economic development, further exacerbated by principles of supply and demand.
Persian Gulf nationals have the will and the means to pursue sexual entertainment, and poorer Muslim communities can supply services in return for financial security.
Sheikh Yusuf Al-Qaradawi, a leading authority and one of the few remaining figures of Islamic scholarship, states that the misyar marriage is religiously legitimate.
In most societies of the Middle East where Islam is the dominant religion, premarital and extramarital sex is considered fornication.
Despite all of these repercussions for extramarital sex, media coverage and human rights groups are revealing that prostitution is present and thriving in the Middle East.