Prostitution in Peru - Human Trafficking

Human Trafficking

is a source, transit point, and destination for trafficked persons. The majority of human trafficking occurs within the country.

Many trafficking victims are women and girls from impoverished rural regions of the Amazon, recruited and coerced into prostitution in urban nightclubs, bars, and brothels, often through false employment offers or promises of education.

Domestic trafficking occurres particularly in districts located in the Andes or the Amazon jungle, to bring underage girls into cities or mining areas to work as prostitutes. Victims are recruited by friends or acquaintances and through newspaper and Internet advertisements or street posters offering employment; some victims are recruited by local employment agencies that offer poor young women from rural areas relatively well-paid "restaurant work" in Lima, Cusco, major coastal cities, and abroad.

The principal victims and groups at high risk for trafficking are children and young women from rural or poor urban areas, persons living in poverty, persons with disabilities, victims of domestic abuse, illiterate persons, and persons lacking birth certificates or other identification documents.

Peru also is a destination country for some Ecuadorian and Bolivian women trafficked for commercial sexual exploitation.