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Political and institutional

Corrupt and inadequately trained police officers can be complicit in human trafficking and/or commit violence against sex workers, including trafficked victims. Human traffickers often incorporate abuse of the legal system into their control tactics by making threats of deportation or by turning victims into the authorities, possibly resulting in the incarceration of the victims.

Anti-trafficking agendas from different groups can also be in conflict. In the movement for sex workers' rights, sex workers establish unions and organizations, which seek to eliminate trafficking. However, law enforcement also seek to eliminate trafficking and to prosecute trafficking, and their work may infringe on sex workers' rights and agency. For example, the sex workers union DMSC (Durbar Mahila Samanwaya Committee) in Kolkata, India, has "self-regulatory boards" (SRBs) that patrol the red light districts and assist girls who are underage or trafficked. The union opposes police intervention and interferes with police efforts to bring minor girls out of brothels, on the grounds that police action might have an adverse impact on non-trafficked sex workers, especially because police officers in many places are corrupt and violent in their operations. A recent seven-country research by the Global Alliance Against Traffic in Women found that sex worker organizations around the world assist women in the industry who are trafficked and should be considered as allies in anti-trafficking work.

Criminalization of sex work also may foster the underground market for sex work and enable sex trafficking.

Difficult political situations such as civil war and social conflict are push factors for migration and trafficking. A study reported that larger countries, the richest and the poorest countries, and countries with restricted press freedom are likely to have higher levels of trafficking. Specifically, being in a transitional economy made a country nineteen times more likely to be ranked in the highest trafficking category, and gender inequalities in a country's labour market also correlated with higher trafficking rates.

The annual U.S. State Department Trafficking in Persons Report for 2013 cited Russia and China as among the worst offenders in combatting forced labour and sex trafficking, raising the possibility of US sanctions being leveraged against these countries. In 1997 alone as many as 175,000 young women from Russia, the former Soviet Union and Eastern and Central Europe were sold as commodities in the sex markets of the developed countries in Europe and the Americas.