Sex Trafficking and the impact it has on the mental health of female victims: A descriptive literature

Abstract

This thesis aims to understand sex trafficking and its psychological impact on female victims. Our main objective is to write a descriptive literature review by collecting data from academic journals. This thesis made use of six academic journals and all these journals elaborated on the various forms of sex trafficking, factors leading to sex trafficking, the types of traumas they face in life, and how sex trafficking affects the mental wellbeing of survivors.

For this thesis, we used three databases - Social Science Premium Collection, EBSCO host (Academic Search Premium), and Sage Journal. The articles used for our review were published between 2017 and 2022. We used six different academic journals to arrive at our final result. All six articles focused on the issue of sex trafficking and its impact on female victims, five of the articles emphasized the different types of traumas and post-traumatic stress disorder in survivors and lastly, one article elaborated on trauma bonding as a negative effect of sex trafficking on survivors.

To conclude, we used a six-step process to analyze the literature and obtain our results. The article we selected provided answers to our research question.

Keywords: Sex Trafficking, Mental Wellbeing, Trauma.