AELIUSPUBLISHING

Research & creative notebooks · I

Male Sex Trafficking and Vulnerable Minorities

Underreporting of male sex trafficking and the vulnerability of sexual minorities in exploitative markets.

Introduction

The question behind this notebook was simple: where is the information?

While researching Antonio’s story—a young Cuban migrant trapped in an abusive relationship—I encountered a problem: the information I needed was surprisingly difficult to find.

International sex trafficking is extensively documented, but almost always through one primary lens: women and girls. Men appear more often in discussions of forced labor, migrant labor exploitation, irregular migration, or servitude. LGBTQ+ people are identified as a high-risk population, but much of the attention centers on transgender women or describes vulnerability in general terms. The young man subjected to sexual exploitation seemed to be both present and absent at the same time.

The novel forced me to look more closely at that blind spot.

Antonio does not represent every victim, nor does his case encompass the entire phenomenon. Fiction is not statistics. But literature can give a body and a face to realities that broad categories sometimes leave unseen.

1. Male Sex Trafficking Exists

Male sex trafficking is neither a melodramatic fantasy nor a literary exaggeration. It is one form of exploitation within the broader phenomenon of human trafficking, or trafficking in persons, and its victims can include boys, adolescents, young men, and adult men.

Such cases may intersect with poverty, irregular migration, sexual orientation, gender identity, homelessness, family violence, economic dependence, debt, intimate-partner abuse, psychological coercion, threats against family members, or digital control.

The problem is identification: no one knows its true scope.

Official reports generally define human trafficking in broad, inclusive terms: men and women, boys and girls, people subjected to labor exploitation as well as sexual exploitation.

Yet when the discussion turns specifically to sexual exploitation, the public imagination—and many statistics—quickly return to the female body. That is not inaccurate in terms of detected prevalence. Women and girls are major victims of sex trafficking, and that reality should never be minimized. But the fact that one form of victimization is more prevalent does not justify ignoring the others.

The male body can also become a sexual commodity. The U.S. Department of State has acknowledged this directly: boys and men can be victims of trafficking, including sexual exploitation, and social stigma may contribute to male cases remaining underreported. The 2023 Trafficking in Persons Report, particularly the section “Overlooked for Too Long: Boys and Human Trafficking,” explicitly recognizes boys and young men as victims of this crime.

A young man can be recruited, deceived, transported, placed in debt, confined, filmed, sold, threatened, forced into prostitution, or turned into sexual content controlled by third parties. Yet relatively little is reported. Why?

A victim may remain silent out of shame, fear of not being believed, or because he still cannot name what is happening to him as exploitation. He may fear that reporting the abuse will expose his actual or perceived sexual orientation. He may come from a country where authority is associated with threat rather than protection. Or he may lack valid immigration documents.

As I read reports from the Department of State and the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, my concern for Antonio kept growing.

In some situations, material dependence can close the trap. If the abuser or trafficker controls food, housing, employment, or the victim’s ability to remain in the country, going to the police may seem less like a path to safety than another form of exposure, punishment, or suspicion.

I imagined the scenes in which Ernesto moves Antonio into his new downtown apartment—more luxurious, with impressive views, but also more isolated. The economic dependence and physical control Ernesto was beginning to exercise over him in that new place must have been terrifying.

None of these factors makes male sex trafficking less real. They make it harder to detect—and give us more reason to talk about it.

2. A Victim Who Does Not Look Like a Victim

I think part of the problem lies in the idea of the “ideal victim.”

Public discourse often imagines the typical victim of sexual exploitation as female, passive, innocent, visibly terrified, without agency, desire, or contradiction. That image may help elicit compassion, but it can also exclude people who do not fit it.

A young man does not fit easily into that mold. If he is physically attractive, people assume he has power. If he is an adult, or close to it, people assume he had a choice. If he has used his image on social media, exposure is mistaken for unlimited consent. If he has previously used sex or sexuality as a means of survival or income, people assume that nothing that happens afterward can qualify as exploitation. If he traveled voluntarily, they assume no one recruited him. If he accepted the promise of modeling work, money, a contract, luxury, or a way out of his immigration situation, they assume he understood everything. If he does not look like a “perfect victim,” he becomes a questionable one.

That prejudice exists, and it matters to the novel.

The chapter “Men, Boys, and LGBTQ: Invisible Victims of Human Trafficking,” by Irma M. Barron and Colleen Frost, in Springer’s Handbook of Sex Trafficking, examines this gender bias: the assumption, rooted in traditional ideas of masculinity, that men are not vulnerable, particularly to sexual exploitation. The belief is common enough: “If you’re a man, you can defend yourself. If you don’t, it must be because you like it.”

Nothing could be further from the truth.

Antonio is not a perfect victim. Nor does he need to be. He has pride, ambition, a desire to move up in the world, vanity, anger, a need for money, a hunger for escape, and confidence in his own ability to survive. He is not a foolish young man. He does not fall because he fails to think. He falls into the trap because pain, urgency, and loneliness shape the choices available to him. He falls because the trap presents itself as opportunity. He falls because his own will can be used against him.

That distinction matters to me as an author. Contemporary trafficking does not always require kidnapping someone off the street or looking like a scene from Taken, the Liam Neeson film. Sometimes a false way out of a desperate situation is enough. A victim can walk into the trap on his own feet—not because he is free, but because every other door has been closed.

3. Underreporting: When Harm Does Not Fit the Expected Category

Underreporting is not a minor statistical detail. It is part of the problem.

If a male victim is never recognized as a victim, he does not receive appropriate help. If he never reports what happened, he never appears in the statistics. If he reports it and is not believed, the institution confirms his belief that silence is safer. And if the case is classified as irregular migration, voluntary prostitution, an intimate-partner dispute, informal work, or an ordinary crime, the trafficking disappears from the record.

The harm occurred, but because it did not fit the expected category, the system made it invisible.

The problem may become especially acute when several factors converge: youth, poverty, migration, sexuality, racism, language, lack of support networks, distrust of institutions, and masculine shame.

A man may feel that acknowledging sexual exploitation diminishes him. He may have learned that a man should always be able to defend himself. He may fear ridicule from other men. He may not have the words to describe what happened. He may have been abused by a partner, a recruiter, or a criminal network without knowing exactly when the relationship stopped being a relationship and became exploitation.

The result is an uncomfortable gap: male sex trafficking is recognized in broad definitions yet poorly represented in everyday language, acknowledged in theory yet inadequately detected in practice, and mentioned in official documents without receiving the same narrative, institutional, or media attention as other forms of sex trafficking.

This notebook was born in that gap: between the existence of the phenomenon and the difficulty of naming it.

4. Survival Sex and Organized Sex Trafficking Are Not the Same Thing

To understand Antonio’s situation, I had to distinguish between two forms of sexual exploitation that can overlap but are not the same.

One is survival sex. Young people facing homelessness, abandonment, extreme poverty, or severe deprivation may exchange sex for food, shelter, money, protection, transportation, drugs, or a safe place to sleep. This does not always involve an organized international network. It may instead be a harsh, local survival economy in which someone tries to survive with the only resources he believes he has left: his body, his youth, his attractiveness, his ability to please, or his capacity to endure.

Organized sex trafficking is different. It may involve recruitment, deception, transportation, threats, debt, control, exploitation by third parties, confiscation of documents, isolation, violence, or coercion. The victim is not simply participating in a subsistence economy; he is inside an infrastructure controlled by someone else. Another person controls his body, his image, his movement, his earnings, his debt, or his access to clients.

That distinction matters.

In the novel, Antonio has known precarity and the logic of using the body as a means of survival. But what lies ahead once Ernesto has him trapped is not simply prostitution born of necessity. It is something else: a sale, a transfer of control, the conversion of a young man into sexual merchandise for a criminal network that intends to exploit him physically and digitally.

Ernesto does not merely abuse him. Ernesto delivers him.

And that difference, even within fiction, still strikes me as intolerable.

5. The Boyfriend as an Insider

Ernesto interested me because I did not want the criminal network to remain faceless and abstract. In many cases of exploitation, danger first enters through intimacy: a partner, lover, friend, contact, recruiter—someone already close to the victim. Violence becomes more effective because it exploits trust that already exists.

Ernesto is that insider.

He does not have to break down the door because he is already inside the house. He does not have to learn how to manipulate Antonio from the beginning because he already knows his vulnerabilities. He knows what hurts him, what he wants, what shames him, what he lacks, what he dreams about, and what he is willing to tolerate in order to escape a life he believes is not enough.

His power comes from more than physical strength. It comes from having gradually narrowed Antonio’s world until almost any way out seems better than staying.

The promise of Dubai—modeling, a contract, luxury, a new life—works because it arrives at exactly the right moment: when Antonio wants to escape Ernesto but does not yet understand that Ernesto has already turned that escape into another cage.

That mechanism matters to the story. Antonio is not captured despite his desire to escape. He is captured through that desire. His hope for a different life, free from abuse, becomes the mechanism of his capture.

6. The False Promise: Modeling, Contracts, Travel, Luxury

False promises of modeling work, employment abroad, opportunities in entertainment, luxury contracts, or international travel appear in real trafficking investigations, including a very recent case in Brazil involving a modeling agency and trafficking to countries in the Middle East.

The point was never to copy a specific case or transplant it mechanically into Antonio’s story. The point was to recognize a mechanism: exploitation can arrive dressed as opportunity.

Luxury is part of the bait.

A city like Dubai can function narratively as a symbol of upward mobility: hotels, skyscrapers, money, fashion, wealthy clients, distance from previous poverty. For a young person coming from deprivation, political control, economic frustration, or dependence on others, that promise can be extraordinarily powerful.

It is not only about money. It is about mattering—about being chosen, seen, and desired by the right world. Ambition, so natural among the young, can sometimes become one of their greatest vulnerabilities.

That is why the false promise need not be crude. The deception can be sophisticated: contracts, agencies, airline tickets, promises of legal status, advance payments, social-media accounts displaying luxurious lives, and testimonials from apparently successful people. All of this can create an illusion of legitimacy—and, in fact, it is part of a recognizable modus operandi.

Once the victim agrees, the network can change the terms: debt for travel expenses, abusive commissions, penalties, confiscation of documents, threats, surveillance, isolation, demands to repay supposed expenses, inability to return home, exposure of intimate images, or threats to report the victim to immigration or law-enforcement authorities.

The U.S. Department of State’s 2025 Trafficking in Persons Report for the United Arab Emirates records investigations, prosecutions, and convictions for sex trafficking and identifies, for the first time in at least five years, male victims of sexual exploitation in the UAE, where Dubai is located. That made me wonder just how serious the underreporting of male sex trafficking there may have been for years.

In the novel, Antonio did not need to be deceived like a child. It was enough to offer him a plausible way out at the moment when he felt most cornered—enough for him to accept it and, without realizing it, seal his own fate.

7. Digital Exploitation Does Not Replace Trafficking. It Updates It

Digital sexual exploitation does not make trafficking obsolete. It updates it.

In another notebook, we take up adult “content” on social media in greater depth; here, it is worth touching on the issue, even briefly.

Contemporary trafficking no longer always requires a visible brothel, a street, or a nightclub. It can operate from an apartment, a phone, a camera, an account managed by third parties, or a false profile.

The victim may be physically confined or psychologically controlled. He may be forced to livestream, produce content, send videos, interact privately with clients online, or maintain a sexual persona designed by others.

The platform itself is not the point. Control is.

If a person does not freely control his body, his image, his money, his schedule, his clients, his documents, or his ability to leave, this is not independent sex work; it is exploitation.

If a network decides what is filmed, when it is broadcast, how much is charged, who receives the money, and what threat is used to enforce obedience, the victim is not a “content creator.”

He is merchandise.

In Antonio’s case, the possibility of turning him into public or semi-private sexual content serves two purposes: profit and submission. The point is not simply to monetize his beauty. It is to break him, to turn the very things that once offered him a path upward—his image, the camera, the gaze of others—into instruments of domination.

That reversal was essential to the novel. Antonio had learned to exist through the screen. The criminal network, through Ernesto, attempts to turn that screen into a cell.

8. Masculinity, Shame, and Silence

Male sex trafficking carries an additional burden: gendered shame.

Many men are taught that they should always be able to defend themselves, endure, remain in control, want sex, never break, never feel used, never ask for help, and never allow themselves to be sexually vulnerable.

That kind of emotional conditioning, common throughout Latin America, can become a prison. A young man who has been sexually exploited may feel that reporting it makes him less of a man. If other men exploited him, he may fear ridicule, insults, or assumptions about his sexual orientation. If a woman or an intimate partner exploited him, he may believe no one will take him seriously. If he initially accepted money, travel, housing, or promises of employment, he may believe he has forfeited the right to call himself a victim.

That silence benefits traffickers.

Exploitation does not depend on physical chains alone. It also relies on shame, stigma, fear of the police, and fear of family. It uses homophobia, racism, language barriers, immigration status, and the assumption that no one will believe an attractive, sexualized young adult man who appears capable of making his own decisions if he later says that he was exploited.

That can leave very few apparent ways out.

Male sex trafficking therefore has to be named—not to compete with other victims, but to keep silence itself from becoming part of the exploitation.

9. Antonio Does Not Represent a Statistic. He Represents a Human Possibility

Antonio is not a sociological category. He is a fictional character.

He does not represent all trafficked men, all young migrants, all LGBTQ+ people, or all Cubans, Venezuelans, Haitians, and other immigrants in vulnerable situations. Nor should he. Fiction does not work by census; it works through embodiment.

A character can illuminate one part of reality without pretending to encompass all of it.

What Antonio allows us to see is one human possibility: a young man who does not resemble the ideal victim. He has agency; he acts and makes decisions, yet he lacks enough power to control the terms of his escape. He uses his image on social media but does not want to be destroyed by it. He accepts a promise that may undo him because the immediate alternative seems worse.

Antonio does not end up trapped because he is weak. He is alone against forces larger than himself: poverty, migration, desire, social media, organized crime, intimate abuse, the sexual marketplace, institutional prejudice, and the absence of adequate language for what is happening to him.

The novel did not need to turn him into a pure symbol. Quite the opposite. The more contradictory Antonio is, the more visible the problem becomes.

Real victims are not always neat, blameless, or easy to defend. They may be confused or ashamed; they may carry complicated histories and choices of their own, intertwined with coercion imposed by others. They may have said yes to something that was not what ultimately happened.

That does not erase the exploitation. It makes it harder to understand.

10. Warning Signs for Vulnerable Young People

I also see a practical purpose for this notebook. It does not attempt to explain the criminal logistics of male trafficking, but it can draw attention to certain common-sense warning signs.

Some signs should be taken seriously by everyone—men, women, vulnerable populations, our sons and daughters:

  • Someone you have only recently met offers travel, modeling work, “luxury” sex work, an international contract, or fast money but avoids clearly explaining who is paying, who controls the contract, and what the actual obligations are.
  • The opportunity requires surrendering a passport, identification documents, accounts, passwords, a phone, or control of social-media profiles.
  • The person offering the opportunity tries to isolate the young person from family, friends, a former partner, community, or trusted contacts.
  • The offer arrives during a moment of crisis: homelessness, the end of a relationship, domestic violence, debt, precarious immigration status, or economic desperation.
  • The supposed contract includes penalties, debts, excessive commissions, inflated expenses, or rules that make it difficult or impossible to leave the arrangement.
  • Luxury is promised, but secrecy is demanded.
  • The young person is pressured to produce intimate content before fully understanding the consequences.
  • The income does not go directly to the person appearing on camera or providing the service.
  • Threats are used: releasing images, reporting the person to immigration authorities, informing the family, falsely accusing the victim, or abandoning the victim in another country.
  • The person who claims to love or protect the young person begins acting as the manager of his body, money, clients, documents, or movement.

No single warning sign proves the existence of a trafficking network. But together they can form a pattern of control.

When control, debt, threats, sexual exploitation, and financial benefit to third parties are present, the right language may no longer be adventure, opportunity, or a complicated relationship.

The right word may be trafficking.

11. Why This Subject Belongs in the World of The Exile of Antinous

This notebook exists because the novel enters a territory I did not want to use merely for dramatic effect.

Antonio’s beauty could not function merely as an aesthetic trait. In a world shaped by social media, migration, desire, and markets, beauty can also create risk. It can open doors, but it can also attract buyers. It can inspire admiration, but also calculation. It can give power to the person who carries it while making him more visible to people who know how to exploit vulnerability.

Papo—Adriano—sees the danger before others because he sees Antonio as a particular human being, not as an available image. That recognition confronts Adriano with an ethical responsibility: to understand another person’s vulnerability as a moral command to assist a person in danger.

Antonio, meanwhile, is inside the storm. He cannot always see the full architecture of what is closing around him.

Male sex trafficking, in this context, is not a subject added for shock value. It belongs to the moral logic of the novel.

If a society cannot recognize certain men as possible victims of sexual exploitation, those men become more vulnerable. If a young migrant believes no one will believe him, he becomes more isolated. If his body is desired but his suffering cannot be recognized, the market has the advantage.

That is why this notebook had to be written.

To put it plainly:

Antonio can be sold because there are male bodies the world desires and consumes, yet prefers not to acknowledge the harm done to them.

Research and Creative Sources

Institutional and Legal Sources

U.S. Department of State, Overlooked for Too Long: Boys and Human Trafficking, in the 2023 Trafficking in Persons Report (2023).
https://2021-2025.state.gov/reports/2023-trafficking-in-persons-report/
Report PDF:
https://2021-2025.state.gov/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/Trafficking-in-Persons-Report-2023_Introduction-Additional-Pagesv4_FINAL.pdf

United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, Global Report on Trafficking in Persons 2024 (2024).
Official PDF:
https://www.unodc.org/documents/data-and-analysis/glotip/2024/GLOTIP2024_BOOK.pdf
United Nations Digital Library record:
https://digitallibrary.un.org/record/4069246

Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, Especially Women and Children, supplementing the United Nations Convention against Transnational Organized Crime, Nov. 15, 2000, 2237 U.N.T.S. 319.
https://www.unodc.org/unodc/en/organized-crime/intro/UNTOC.html

U.S. Department of State, Trafficking in Persons Report 2025: United Arab Emirates (2025).
https://www.state.gov/reports/2025-trafficking-in-persons-report/united-arab-emirates/

U.S. Department of State, Trafficking in Persons Report 2025: Qatar (2025).
https://www.state.gov/reports/2025-trafficking-in-persons-report/qatar/

U.S. Department of State, Trafficking in Persons Report 2025: Saudi Arabia (2025).
https://www.state.gov/reports/2025-trafficking-in-persons-report/saudi-arabia/

Male Trafficking, the “Ideal Victim,” and Invisibility

Rebecca Surtees, Trafficking of Men: A Trend Less Considered: The Case of Belarus and Ukraine, IOM Migration Research Series No. 36 (2008).
https://publications.iom.int/books/mrs-no-36-trafficking-men-trend-less-considered-case-belarus-and-ukraine

Saskia Blume, Masculinity and the “Ideal Victim” in the US Trafficking Discourse, COMPAS Working Paper No. 124, University of Oxford (2015).
https://www.compas.ox.ac.uk/publication/masculinity-and-the-ideal-victim-in-the-us-trafficking-discourse

Jessica Jackman, Male Human Trafficking as an Unrecognised Problem, The BSIS Journal of International Studies, Vol. 9 (2012).
https://research.kent.ac.uk/brusselsjournal/wp-content/uploads/sites/1946/2022/03/Jessica-Jackman-Male-Human-Trafficking-as-an-Unrecognised-Problem.pdf

Marie Nodzenski, Allard W. de Smalen, Nicola S. Pocock, Mark Kavenagh, Ligia Kiss & Ana Maria Buller, Human Trafficking of Boys and Young Men: A Systematic Literature Review of Impacts on Mental Health and Implications for Services in Post-Trafficking Settings, Social Sciences 13, no. 11 (2024): 567.
https://doi.org/10.3390/socsci13110567

Irma M. Barron & Colleen Frost, Men, Boys, and LGBTQ: Invisible Victims of Human Trafficking, in Handbook of Sex Trafficking: Feminist Transnational Perspectives, eds. Lenore Walker, Giselle Gaviria & Kalyani Gopal, 73–84 (Springer, 2018).
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-73621-1_8

Youth Homelessness, Survival Sex, and Vulnerability

Marya Viorst Gwadz et al., The Initiation of Homeless Youth into the Street Economy, Journal of Adolescence 32, no. 2 (2009): 357–377.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.adolescence.2008.01.004

Covenant House International, Human Trafficking / The Intersection of Youth Homelessness and Human Trafficking.
https://www.covenanthouse.org/homeless-issues/human-trafficking

Technology, Social Media, and Digital Exploitation

Europol, The Challenges of Countering Human Trafficking in the Digital Era (2020).
https://www.europol.europa.eu/cms/sites/default/files/documents/the_challenges_of_countering_human_trafficking_in_the_digital_era.pdf

United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, Technology Facilitating Trafficking in Persons, Teaching Module Series, Module 14.
https://sherloc.unodc.org/cld/en/education/tertiary/tip-and-som/module-14/key-issues/technology-facilitating-trafficking-in-persons.html

Inter-Agency Coordination Group against Trafficking in Persons, Human Trafficking and Technology: Trends, Challenges and Opportunities (2019).
https://icat.un.org/sites/g/files/tmzbdl461/files/human_trafficking_and_technology_trends_challenges_and_opportunities_web.pdf

False Promises, Modeling, Dubai, and Transnational Trafficking

Polícia Federal / Ministério da Justiça e Segurança Pública do Brasil, PF desarticula falsa agência de modelos que traficava mulheres para o exterior (Operação Catwalk, Dec. 18, 2024).
https://agenciagov.ebc.com.br/noticias/202412/pf-desarticula-falsa-agencia-de-modelos-que-traficava-mulheres-com-promessa-de-trabalho-no-exterior

Maggie Michael, Reuters / International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, How Torture, Deception and Inaction Underpin UAE’s Thriving Sex Trafficking Industry (June 12, 2023).
https://www.icij.org/investigations/trafficking-inc/how-torture-deception-and-inaction-underpin-the-uaes-thriving-sex-trafficking-industry/

Carmen Molina Acosta, International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, Nigeria Arrests Human Trafficker Spotlit by ICIJ (Jan. 3, 2025).
https://www.icij.org/investigations/trafficking-inc/nigeria-arrests-human-trafficker-spotlit-by-icij/

Creative Sources

Taken. Directed by Pierre Morel. Screenplay by Luc Besson and Robert Mark Kamen. 2008.

Final Note

Naming a form of violence does not explain all of it. But it allows us to see it. This notebook holds to that intention: to call things by their names, without allowing the beauty of language to conceal harm. If a young person reads these pages and recognizes a warning sign before becoming isolated, then this work will also have served a human purpose.

Note to the Reader

This notebook is part of the research and creative materials behind The Exile of Antinous. It is not a chapter of the novel, a definitive explanation of its characters, or an academic essay. It is an author’s notebook: a working document of reflection and archive, where psychological, philosophical, historical, social, and literary readings intersect with the process of imagining a contemporary story about beauty, exile, the body, social media, desire, danger, care, and loyalty.

These notebooks and creative notes do not explain the novel. They simply reveal some of the materials, questions, and references that helped make it possible to imagine.

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