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How the Psychology of Sexual Motivation Predicts Trafficking Vulnerability

A Research Synthesis Linking the Hungarian YSEX? Study

to the Mechanisms of Sexual Exploitation

“I didn’t want to lose the person. I wanted to avoid a fight. Out of duty.”

— Top-endorsed items, Sex as Coping factor, YSEX? Hungarian Sexual Motivation Study (Meskó et al., 2021)

“I didn’t want to disappoint him. He said I owed him. I was afraid of what would happen if I said no.”

— Composite statement derived from trafficking survivor narratives

The distance between these two sets of statements is shorter than we would like to believe.

Part I: Why People Have Sex — The YSEX? Framework

In 2007, American psychologists Cindy Meston and David Buss catalogued 237 reasons why people have sex, producing a four-factor model of sexual motivation: Physical Reasons, Goal Attainment, Emotional Reasons, and Insecurity. Their work became the standard framework in the field. But a question lingered: were these motivations universal, or were they shaped by the culture that produced them?

Between 2021 and 2022, evolutionary psychologist Norbert Meskó and his team at the University of Pécs in Hungary answered that question. Rather than translating the American instrument and assuming its structure would hold, they built a Hungarian-specific questionnaire from the ground up. Across three studies and nearly 5,000 participants, they asked Hungarians to describe, in their own words, why they had sex. The factor structure that emerged was fundamentally different from the American model.

Three factors, not four, best described Hungarian sexual motivation:

Personal Goal Attainment  merged what the Americans had separated into Physical Reasons and Goal Attainment. Its eight subfactors—Novelty Seeking, Conformity, Infidelity, Impulsiveness, Revenge, Sensation Seeking, Control and Power, and Self-Esteem Boost—described sex as pursuit, conquest, and self-gratification. Characteristic items: “For the hunt,” “I needed a one-night stand,” “Out of longing for adventure.” Men scored significantly higher on this factor.

Relational Reasons  encompassed nine subfactors including Sexual Desire, Commitment, Care, Physical Attraction, Intimacy, and Happiness Seeking. This was the domain of sex motivated by genuine desire and emotional connection. Top items: “I wanted to have an orgasm,” “Because of sexual desire,” “I wanted pleasure.” No overall gender difference appeared on this factor.

Sex as Coping  was the most culturally distinctive factor and the most consequential for the thesis of this article. Its seven subfactors described sex deployed not for pleasure or connection but as an instrument for managing anxiety, preventing loss, and navigating power: Mitigating Emotional Deficit, Compulsion and Avoidance, Utilitarianism, Coping with Relational Conflicts, Submissiveness, Dealing with Partner’s Emotional Demands, and Mate Retention. The items that loaded onto this factor read like a catalog of coerced compliance: “I didn’t want to lose the person,” “I wanted to avoid a fight or conflict,” “I wanted to save the relationship,” “Out of duty.” Women scored significantly higher on this factor, driven by the Submissiveness and Mate Retention subfactors.

Who Copes with Sex, and Why

The personality correlates of the Sex as Coping factor were striking. Neuroticism—emotional instability, anxiety, vulnerability to negative affect—correlated positively with Sex as Coping only in women. Emotionally unstable women were significantly more likely to report sexual motivation driven by mate retention, dealing with partner’s emotional demands, submission, and coping with relational conflicts. They were using sex as an emotion-regulation strategy—deploying their bodies to manage relationships they feared losing and partners whose displeasure they dreaded.

Within Sex as Coping, the Utilitarianism subfactor warrants particular attention. Items such as “I wanted to profit from it,” “It was a way to reach my goal,” and “I wanted to benefit from it” captured a transactional orientation toward sex—a recognition that sex has exchange value. Combined with Submissiveness (“I didn’t want to disappoint the other person”) and Mate Retention (“I didn’t want to lose the person”), this constellation describes a psychological profile in which sex is simultaneously a tool for survival and a price paid for security. In the general population, these endorsements are mild. At the extreme end of the continuum they describe, they constitute the precise psychological architecture that sex traffickers target and exploit.

Mate Retention as Coping, Not Relating

Perhaps the study’s most important structural finding was that Mate Retention appeared under Sex as Coping—not under Relational Reasons, where one might expect it. In the American model, mate retention would be associated with love, commitment, and the positive maintenance of relationships. In the Hungarian data, it clustered with duty, submission, and conflict avoidance. Hungarians, it appeared, experience keeping a partner through sex not as an expression of love but as an anxiety response—a coping behavior driven by fear of loss rather than desire for connection. This single structural difference captures a cultural reality that, at its extreme, enables trafficking. Where sex-for-partner-retention is experienced as a positive relational behavior, it reinforces mutual investment. Where it is experienced as anxious coping, it reinforces the power asymmetry that predators exploit.

Part II: The Cultural Substrate — Sex as Commodity

To understand why the Sex as Coping pattern carries particular significance—and particular danger—in the Eastern European context from which it emerged, one must understand the sexual culture that produces it.

Across much of Eastern Europe, with significant variation by country, generation, and the urban-rural divide, the dominant sexual script operates on a foundational assumption: sex is something a man does to a woman, not something two people do with each other. This is not merely an attitude. It is a structural framing that determines who initiates, who receives, whose pleasure matters, whose body is the site of the transaction, and—critically—who holds power in the encounter. The woman’s role is to be available, accommodating, and responsive to male desire. Her own desire is secondary; her own pleasure is incidental; her own agency is, at best, the power to say no—and in many contexts, even that power is constrained by economic dependence, cultural expectation, and the architecture of intimate relationships.

This framing has a direct and devastating consequence: it transforms sex from a mutual human experience into a commodity—something a woman possesses and a man acquires. Once sex is conceptualized as a commodity, the only remaining questions are the terms of exchange, the price, and the degree of coercion involved in the transaction. The distance between a woman who has dutiful sex to maintain her marriage, a woman who trades sexual access for financial security, and a woman who is trafficked across borders and forced to service strangers is not a distance of kind. It is a distance of degree along the same continuum—a continuum that the cultural framing of sex-as-commodity makes possible.

The evidence for this framing is both behavioral and attitudinal. Cross-cultural studies on sexual reciprocity consistently show that acts centered on female pleasure—such as cunnilingus—are far less prevalent in Eastern European cultures than in Western Europe or North America, while acts centered on male pleasure remain common. The asymmetry is not merely a matter of preference; it reflects the underlying assumption about whose experience counts. In cultures where men avoid any sexual behavior coded as deferential or subordinate—and where homophobia reinforces that avoidance—women’s sexual pleasure becomes structurally de-prioritized, reinforcing the notion that sex exists to serve male gratification. This same logic, extended to its endpoint, produces the commodity framework on which trafficking depends.

The Forces That Sustain the Script

Several converging forces maintain this sexual-commodity framework across Eastern Europe:

Gender inequality and economic dependence.  Economic power imbalances between men and women remain substantially higher in Eastern Europe than in Western or Northern Europe. When a woman cannot afford to leave a relationship, she cannot afford to negotiate sexual boundaries, demand reciprocity, or refuse unwanted encounters. Economic dependence is the bedrock on which the commodity framing of sex is built, and it is the same economic precarity that makes women vulnerable to traffickers who offer promises of employment, security, and escape.

Institutionalized homophobia.  Prevalent across the region—from Russia’s federal anti-LGBT legislation to Hungary’s 2021 law restricting depictions of homosexuality to Poland’s position as the EU country with the lowest acceptance of non-heteronormative behavior—homophobia constrains male sexual behavior in ways that reinforce the commodity script. When men avoid any behavior coded as submissive or feminine, they avoid attending to women’s pleasure, solidifying the expectation that sex is a service women provide for men’s benefit.

Religiosity.  Orthodox Christianity (dominant in Romania, Bulgaria, Ukraine, Serbia, and Russia) and traditional Catholicism (dominant in Poland) both stigmatize non-procreative sexual acts and frame female sexual pleasure as morally suspect. Religious teaching that equates female sexuality with sin or moral failure reinforces the notion that a woman’s body exists solely in service of reproduction or male satisfaction—a framework that aligns directly with the commodification of sex.

The urban-rural divide.  This is the single most important predictor of sexual attitudes within any Eastern European country, and the gap is substantially larger than in the United States or Australia. A young, educated woman in Budapest or Prague may inhabit a sexual world virtually indistinguishable from her counterpart in Amsterdam. A woman of the same age in a rural Hungarian, Romanian, or Polish village may inhabit a world where the commodity framework remains unchallenged. These rural communities—most isolated from modernizing norms, most entrenched in traditional gender roles—are precisely the communities from which traffickers most frequently recruit.

The Soviet legacy.  Before the early 1990s, official sex surveys were not possible in many Eastern European countries. The Communist system suppressed not only political freedom but the cultural conversation about sex that, in Western Europe, gradually produced norms of reciprocity, consent, and mutual pleasure. When the system collapsed, these populations—denied both sexual education and the economic development that correlates with gender equality—were suddenly exposed to consumer capitalism. The collision produced an explosion in commercial sex markets, with women from the East providing the supply for demand generated in the West.

Part III: The Victim — How Coping Becomes Captivity

The clinical and empirical literature on trafficking victims reveals a vulnerability profile that maps with disturbing precision onto the YSEX? Sex as Coping factor and its personality correlates.

The Schema Overlap

In 2025, Meskó published a comprehensive review of sexual-economic exchange in Archives of Sexual Behavior that extended the YSEX? findings into the domain of transactional sex. His team found that individuals with greater openness to sex-for-resources exchanges—even those not involved in sex work—exhibited significantly higher levels of maladaptive emotion regulation strategies, maladaptive personality traits, and early maladaptive schemas, particularly in the domains of abandonment, emotional deprivation, social isolation, and impulsivity. These are the same schemas that drove the Sex as Coping motivational pattern in ordinary relationships.

The trafficking vulnerability literature identifies a nearly identical profile. Research consistently documents the following pre-trafficking risk factors: childhood maltreatment including physical, sexual, and emotional abuse; insecure attachment, particularly preoccupied attachment characterized by abandonment fear, interpersonal dependence, and emotional dysregulation; borderline personality traits including identity disturbance, chronic emptiness, and frantic efforts to avoid real or imagined abandonment; substance dependence; and reduced decision-making capacity associated with poor mental health. Studies using the Childhood Trauma Questionnaire have demonstrated that early abuse produces precisely the schemas—mistrust, emotional deprivation, defectiveness, social isolation, and abandonment—that Meskó found predicting openness to sexual-economic exchange.

The overlap is not approximate. It is nearly exact. The cognitive psychological literature makes the mechanism explicit: childhood abuse produces early maladaptive schemas that shape how adult women perceive relationships, creating patterns of insecure attachment, tolerance of mistreatment, and the belief that sex is the primary currency through which safety and connection can be purchased. Qualitative research with trafficking survivors confirms that traffickers specifically target individuals whose need for love and validation has been thwarted by dysfunctional families, creating a greater craving for validation and consequently greater vulnerability to manipulation. Individuals with underlying mental illness or personality disorders are at significantly higher risk for exploitation due to impaired judgment and impulsivity.

The Grooming-to-Coping Pipeline

Trafficking does not typically begin with abduction. It begins with the identification and exploitation of the psychological profile described above. The mechanism operates through the attachment system. A trafficker approaches a young woman—often from a rural community, often with a history of childhood adversity, often economically precarious—and offers what she has been denied: attention, affection, promises of a better life. He creates an attachment bond. In attachment theory terms, he activates her preoccupied attachment style—her hypervigilance about abandonment, her willingness to tolerate mistreatment to maintain a bond, her tendency to exaggerate the danger of losing the relationship.

Once the bond is established, the trafficker leverages it. The progression follows the YSEX? Sex as Coping subfactors with chilling precision:

Mate Retention (“I didn’t want to lose the person”) is the initial compliance mechanism. She has sex with him—and later with others at his direction—because she fears losing the relationship, the only source of security and affection she has known. The YSEX? data showed this motivation clustered with anxiety and coping, not with love and commitment. For the trafficking victim, the pattern is the same, amplified to the point of captivity.

Submissiveness (“I didn’t want to disappoint the other person,” “Out of duty”) escalates as the power dynamic solidifies. She complies because she has internalized the schema that her role is to accommodate, that her value lies in her compliance, that disappointing him carries consequences she cannot bear. The cultural substrate—sex is what a man does to a woman—has already taught her this lesson. The trafficker merely intensifies it.

Dealing with Partner’s Emotional Demands (“The other person was in the mood, so I went along”) describes the erasure of her own desire as a relevant variable. His wants become the only wants that matter. Her body becomes the instrument through which demands are met—whether those demands are his own or those of clients he directs her to service.

Coping with Relational Conflicts (“I wanted to avoid a fight/conflict”) operates through the threat of violence. She has learned that refusal triggers punishment. Sex becomes avoidance behavior—the thing she does to prevent the worse thing from happening.

Utilitarianism (“It was a way to reach my goal,” “I wanted to profit from it”) emerges as the final psychological adaptation. She reframes the exploitation as strategy. She tells herself she is making a choice, earning money, working toward eventual freedom. This reframing—which the trafficking literature identifies as a common psychological survival mechanism—mirrors the utilitarian motivation that appeared in the general-population YSEX? data, but stripped of genuine agency.

The critical insight is this: the trafficker does not need to teach his victim to have sex for coping reasons. He needs only to find someone who already does—someone whose childhood, attachment history, cultural environment, and psychological makeup have already installed the program—and place her in a context where the “coping” serves his economic interests.

The Trauma Bond and the Neuroticism Connection

The YSEX? finding that Neuroticism correlated with Sex as Coping only in women acquires darker significance in the trafficking context. Emotionally unstable women—those with heightened anxiety, abandonment fear, and difficulty regulating negative emotion—are more likely to have sex for mate retention, submission, and conflict avoidance in ordinary relationships. The same emotional instability makes them more vulnerable to the intermittent reinforcement patterns that characterize trafficking relationships: cycles of affection and punishment, warmth and withdrawal, that produce trauma bonds functionally identical to those observed in domestic violence.

The clinical literature documents that trafficking victims frequently develop feelings of loyalty and dependency toward their traffickers, often returning to them even after rescue. This pattern is consistent with the preoccupied attachment style and abandonment schema that predicts both the Sex as Coping motivational pattern and trafficking vulnerability. Research with trafficking survivors in England found that 78% of female survivors had experienced emotional health issues, and that poor mental health may itself increase vulnerability to trafficking through “reduced decision-making capacity or understanding and increased dependence on others.” That “increased dependence on others” is the attachment system in crisis—the same system that, in its milder dysregulation, produces the Sex as Coping pattern in ordinary relationships.

Part IV: The Trafficker — Personal Goal Attainment as Predation

If the victim’s psychology maps onto Sex as Coping, the trafficker’s psychology maps onto the opposite end of the YSEX? framework: Personal Goal Attainment, with its subfactors of Control and Power, Novelty Seeking, Impulsiveness, and the instrumental use of others for self-interested ends.

The Client as First Responder

A critical distinction must be drawn between the men who purchase sex and the men who traffic women. These are not the same populations, and conflating them obscures one of the most important dynamics in trafficking identification: clients are often the first people to recognize that a woman is being trafficked, and their reports are among the most effective tools for victim recovery. Data from the Human Trafficking Institute’s Federal Human Trafficking Report—which has tracked over 3,100 federal criminal trafficking cases across more than two decades—demonstrates that tips from clients who encounter trafficking victims are among the most actionable leads law enforcement receives, in some analyses proving more effective at initiating successful investigations than even victim self-reports.

The YSEX? framework itself explains why this is the case. The study’s three-factor structure reveals that the vast majority of male sexual motivation falls under Relational Reasons and the benign dimensions of Personal Goal Attainment—desire, physical attraction, pleasure seeking, novelty, and the pursuit of sexual satisfaction. These are motivations that assume a willing partner. A man driven by Relational Reasons—who seeks sexual desire, intimacy, physical attraction, and mutual pleasure—is psychologically oriented toward reciprocity. Even the man motivated by Personal Goal Attainment subfactors like Novelty Seeking or Sensation Seeking is pursuing an experience predicated on the other person’s participation, not her subjugation. The YSEX? data showed no overall gender difference on the Relational Reasons factor: men and women endorse desire, attraction, and pleasure-based motivations at comparable rates. This means the typical client’s motivational profile is fundamentally incompatible with coercion. He is seeking an encounter shaped by desire—and when he instead encounters fear, captivity, or distress, the dissonance between what he expected and what he observes is precisely what makes him a potential witness and reporter.

The National Institute of Justice has documented this pattern explicitly, noting that law enforcement has identified numerous sex trafficking cases based on information provided by individuals at the margins of commercial sex operations—including clients. In one representative case, an anti-trafficking hotline received a call from a man who reported that he had visited a brothel where a Central American woman was crying and told him she was afraid the operators would harm her family if she refused to continue. That single call initiated a federal investigation. The NIJ emphasizes that because traffickers operate within specific communities and networks that are often impenetrable to undercover operations, individuals who have direct contact with these environments—including clients—are uniquely positioned to identify coercion, fear, and captivity that would otherwise remain invisible.

This reality inverts the assumption that commercial sex clients are part of the trafficking problem. The typical client is not seeking a coerced or trafficked woman. When he encounters one—when he sees fear where he expected consent, captivity where he expected a transaction, bruises and tears where he expected a willing participant—he is often disturbed enough to act. The question for anti-trafficking policy is not how to eliminate commercial sex clients but how to equip them to recognize the signs of trafficking and give them clear, anonymous channels through which to report what they observe. Clients occupy a position no law enforcement officer, social worker, or hotline operator can replicate: they are inside the room where trafficking happens, face to face with the victim, in a moment when the trafficker’s guard is down.

The most innovative tool currently leveraging this insight is the Twentyfour-Seven Anti-Trafficking QR Code®, a survivor-led system founded by Tsvetelina Thompson, herself a survivor of sex trafficking. The patented QR codes are deployed in strategic locations—hotels, truck stops, restaurants, and other venues where trafficking victims are most likely to be present or pass through. When scanned, the code opens an encrypted web application that allows anyone—victim, client, bystander—to file a report anonymously. The system uses AES-256 encryption and leaves no trace in browser history, a critical feature for both victims whose phones may be monitored by traffickers and clients who need assurance that reporting will not expose them to legal jeopardy. Reports are transmitted in real time directly to authorized local law enforcement, and the platform is multilingual, automatically connecting users to localized support services in their preferred language.

The results are striking. Twentyfour-Seven’s data demonstrates that their QR code system reaches approximately 5.36% of potential trafficking victims—more than ten times the estimated reach of conventional methods endorsed by governments and established anti-trafficking organizations, which reach less than half of one percent. Of reports captured through the system, 71% contain sufficient data for law enforcement to initiate an investigation. Twentyfour-Seven defines “clients” in their data as any observer who reported possible trafficking observed during the procurement of commercial sex—and these client-generated reports have proven to be among the most actionable intelligence the system produces. The system’s design reflects a fundamental insight: phone calls leave records on cellular bills and call logs, providing traffickers with evidence that a victim or observer attempted to report. A QR code scan does not. By removing the barriers to anonymous reporting, the Twentyfour-Seven system transforms the commercial sex client from a passive participant in a market that may contain trafficking victims into an active, equipped first responder.

The Trafficker: The Predator Profile

The trafficker himself represents an extreme expression of Personal Goal Attainment motivations fused with Dark Tetrad personality characteristics. He seeks control and power over others. He treats sex instrumentally—not as something he experiences but as something he manages for profit. His impulsivity and sensation seeking manifest not in his own sexual behavior but in the thrill of manipulation, the acquisition of new victims, the expansion of his operation. The YSEX? item “For the hunt” takes on a literal meaning: the grooming process is a hunt, and the victim is prey selected for the very psychological characteristics—submission, abandonment fear, utilitarian orientation—that make her controllable.

The psychological research on traffickers’ tactics confirms this profile. Studies document that traffickers employ sophisticated psychological manipulation: grooming through false romantic relationships, creating dependency through isolation and debt bondage, maintaining control through intermittent reinforcement, and suppressing resistance through fear conditioning. These are not impulsive acts of violence; they are calculated strategies deployed by individuals who understand, intuitively or explicitly, the attachment vulnerabilities of their targets. The trafficker identifies the woman running the Sex as Coping program—the woman who will submit to keep a bond, who will comply to avoid conflict, who will reframe exploitation as strategy—and engineers a context in which those tendencies serve his financial interests.

The Commodification Loop

The cultural script described earlier—sex as something done to a woman rather than with her—creates the conceptual infrastructure that makes trafficking psychologically possible for the trafficker. If sex is already understood as a commodity that women provide and men consume, then the trafficker’s innovation is merely logistical: he industrializes the transaction, inserts himself as middleman, and captures the economic surplus. The woman’s body was already understood as a site of extraction. The trafficker simply formalizes the arrangement.

Meskó’s 2025 review explicitly addresses this connection. Drawing on Baumeister and Vohs’s sexual economics theory, he demonstrates that openness to sex-for-resources exchanges is linked to self-centered sexual motivation, unrestricted sociosexuality, and socially maladaptive traits including Machiavellianism and subclinical psychopathy—the very traits that characterize the trafficker’s personality profile. The Dark Tetrad—narcissism, Machiavellianism, subclinical psychopathy, and sadism—predicts not the behavior of commercial sex clients but the behavior of the men who exploit, coerce, and control women for profit. The trafficker scores at the extreme of these dimensions: he grooms through false romantic relationships, creates dependency through isolation and debt, and maintains control through fear. His Personal Goal Attainment motivations are not sexual—they are economic and psychological, driven by the desire for power over others. The disproportionately high prevalence of borderline and antisocial personality disorders among women already involved in prostitution suggests that these psychological vulnerabilities predate involvement in sex work rather than resulting from it. For the borderline-profile woman, transactional thinking about sex is not predatory—it is survival. She has learned that sex is the currency she has, and the only reliable way to maintain attachment bonds or access resources. The trafficker does not need to teach her this; he needs only to find someone who already believes it.

Part V: The Eastern European Pipeline

The structural conditions described in this article converge with particular intensity in the trafficking corridors that run from Eastern to Western Europe. Romania, Bulgaria, Poland, Ukraine, Moldova, and the Western Balkans are among the primary source countries for women trafficked into sexual exploitation in the European Union. The United Kingdom alone has identified trafficking victims from more than 80 countries, with Romania and Poland among the most frequently represented nationalities.

Source Communities: Where the Coping Pattern Is Installed

In the source communities—typically rural, economically depressed, with limited educational opportunity and strong traditional gender roles—young women grow up in environments that install precisely the psychological architecture described by the Sex as Coping factor. They learn that sex is duty—something owed to partners, extracted by social expectation, performed without reference to their own desire. They learn submissiveness—that accommodation and compliance are female virtues, that male displeasure is dangerous, that their value lies in their usefulness to others. Many experience childhood abuse—physical, sexual, or emotional—that produces the maladaptive schemas of abandonment, emotional deprivation, and mistrust that Meskó’s research identified as predicting openness to sexual-economic exchange. And they experience economic precarity that makes any offer of escape—however dubious—compelling.

The trafficker arrives in this environment not as an alien force but as the logical endpoint of the cultural system. He offers a relationship, activating attachment needs. He promises economic opportunity in Western Europe, activating utilitarian motivation. He presents himself as a protector and provider, activating mate retention instincts. The initial compliance is often voluntary—the woman agrees to travel, agrees to work, agrees to the relationship. The coercion escalates incrementally: document confiscation, isolation from family and support networks, debt bondage, threats of violence, and finally direct force. By the time the woman recognizes her situation, the trauma bond is established, her psychological coping mechanisms have been co-opted, and the Sex as Coping motivational pattern—which she carried from her community of origin—has been weaponized against her.

Destination Countries: Isolation as Control

Women trafficked from Eastern Europe arrive in destination countries—Germany, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Spain, Italy, Belgium—where the cultural gap between source and destination creates an additional layer of exploitation. A Romanian or Bulgarian woman trafficked to Western Europe faces not only the direct coercion of her trafficker but also linguistic, cultural, and social isolation that amplifies every vulnerability. She does not speak the local language. She does not understand the legal system. She does not know that services exist for people in her situation. Her trafficker is her only interpreter, her only connection to the world outside. The isolation that the trafficking literature identifies as one of the most powerful tools of control is built into the geography of cross-border trafficking.

It is in these destination environments that the client’s role as potential first responder becomes most critical. The trafficked woman cannot call a hotline in a language she does not speak, navigate a legal system she does not understand, or reach services she does not know exist. But a local client who recognizes the signs of coercion—fear, bruising, inability to leave, a third party controlling the interaction—can. Federal data consistently shows that these client-initiated reports are among the most effective pathways to victim identification, precisely because the client occupies the one position from which trafficking is visible: inside the encounter itself, where the trafficker’s control is briefly interrupted by the presence of an outsider.

Historical attempts to eliminate prostitution—and by extension the trafficking that feeds it—have yielded mixed results that underscore the importance of the client’s role. In the Soviet Union, prostitution was officially denied under Communist doctrine, which framed it as a remnant of capitalism. Despite this denial, prostitution persisted throughout the Soviet era. Sweden’s Nordic Model, which criminalizes clients while exempting sex workers, reportedly reduced visible street prostitution but also drove the trade underground, increasing sex workers’ vulnerability to violence and—critically—eliminating the very reporting channel that federal trafficking data identifies as most effective. When clients face criminal prosecution for purchasing sex, they cannot report trafficking without incriminating themselves. The policy intended to protect victims may inadvertently silence the people best positioned to identify them. Meskó’s 2025 review concludes that the persistence of sexual-economic exchange reflects its deep entanglement with fundamental human mating strategies and entrenched societal structures, making complete eradication an unrealistic goal. The more productive focus, he argues, lies in mitigating harm, addressing inequalities, and fostering environments that prioritize the well-being and autonomy of those most vulnerable—an approach that would include empowering clients as allies rather than treating them as criminals.

Part VI: The Continuum

The central argument of this article is that the YSEX? motivational framework does not merely describe why people have sex. It describes a continuum of sexual agency that runs from mutual pleasure through strategic self-interest through reluctant compliance to outright exploitation—and that the factors identified in a general population study map, with uncomfortable precision, onto the dynamics of trafficking.

At one end of this continuum stands the woman who has sex because she wants to—because of desire, attraction, intimacy, the pursuit of pleasure. Her motivations are captured by the Relational Reasons factor. She is the woman most likely to experience reciprocal sexual pleasure, most likely to report sexual satisfaction, and least likely to tolerate a partner who treats sex as something done to her.

At the other end stands the trafficking victim, for whom sex has become entirely instrumental—a behavior performed under coercion to avoid punishment, maintain a trauma bond, or survive. Her motivations are a pathological amplification of the Sex as Coping factor: submission, duty, conflict avoidance, and utilitarian calculation stripped of any genuine agency.

Between these extremes lies a vast territory of sexual experiences shaped by culture, economics, psychology, and power—the woman who has dutiful sex in a marriage she cannot leave; the woman who trades sexual access for economic security; the woman who performs sexual acts she does not enjoy because her partner expects them and she fears his displeasure; the woman who agrees to travel abroad with a man she barely knows because the alternative is poverty. Each of these women is, to varying degrees, running the Sex as Coping program that the YSEX? study identified in a general population sample.

The trafficker operates at the extreme of the Personal Goal Attainment factor: instrumental, power-seeking, sensation-driven, emotionally detached. He identifies the woman at the coping end of the continuum and engineers a context that transforms her existing motivational patterns into mechanisms of control. The culture that frames sex as a commodity—something a man does to a woman, something a woman provides as service—supplies the conceptual framework that makes this engineering possible. The psychological vulnerabilities installed by childhood adversity provide the raw material. The economic structures of inequality provide the motive force.

What This Means for Prevention

Understanding trafficking as the extreme of a motivational continuum rather than as a categorically distinct phenomenon has concrete implications for prevention and intervention. If the Sex as Coping motivational pattern is a risk factor—and the convergent evidence from the YSEX? study, the trafficking vulnerability literature, and Meskó’s work on sexual-economic exchange strongly suggests that it is—then early identification of this pattern in at-risk populations could serve a protective function.

Programs that address the underlying schemas—abandonment, emotional deprivation, social isolation, and impulsivity—before they are exploited could reduce vulnerability. Culturally informed sexual education that challenges the commodity framing of sex and promotes mutual sexual agency could erode the cultural substrate on which trafficking depends. Economic development initiatives targeted at the rural communities that produce trafficking victims could address the material conditions that make the trafficker’s promises compelling. And interventions that identify and treat the attachment disruptions and trauma histories that produce the Sex as Coping profile could interrupt the pipeline at its earliest stage—before the coping pattern has been weaponized into captivity.

Conclusion

The YSEX? study was designed to understand why Hungarians have sex. It was not designed to illuminate trafficking. But by revealing the motivational structure underlying sex-as-coping—and by showing how that structure differs from the American model in ways that reflect Eastern European cultural realities—it inadvertently mapped the psychological terrain on which trafficking operates.

The items that Hungarian women endorsed most strongly under the Sex as Coping factor—“I didn’t want to lose the person,” “Out of duty,” “I wanted to avoid a fight”—are not just reasons for having sex. They are the mechanisms through which exploitation is achieved, maintained, and internalized. The Utilitarianism subfactor—“I wanted to profit from it,” “It was a way to reach my goal”—describes the psychological moment at which coping tips into transactional exchange. The Submissiveness subfactor describes the moment at which compliance becomes captivity. And the cultural framing that surrounds all of it—sex as something done to a woman, sex as commodity, sex as service—is the medium in which these psychological patterns develop, the soil in which trafficking takes root.

Understanding the motivational continuum that connects ordinary sexual coping to trafficking exploitation is not an exercise in pathologizing women who have sex for reasons other than desire. It is an exercise in recognizing that the same psychological forces operate across the full range of sexual experience, and that the conditions that push a woman from the coping end of that range toward the exploitation end are identifiable, predictable, and—with sufficient political will and cultural honesty—preventable.

Key References

Primary Sources

Meskó, N., Szabó, L., İreiter, Z., & Láng, A. (2021–2022). YSEX? Hungarian Sexual Motivation Study, Studies 1–3. University of Pécs, Department of Cognitive and Evolutionary Psychology.

Meskó, N. (2025). The Multiple Perspectives Approach to Understanding Sexual-Economic Exchange. Archives of Sexual Behavior, 54(9), 3287–3311.

Meston, C. M., & Buss, D. M. (2007). Why Humans Have Sex. Archives of Sexual Behavior, 36(4), 477–507.

Baumeister, R. A., & Vohs, K. D. (2004). Sexual Economics: Sex as Female Resource for Social Exchange in Heterosexual Interactions. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 8(4), 339–363.

Trafficking and Vulnerability

Human Trafficking Institute. (2023). 2023 Federal Human Trafficking Report. Washington, D.C.

National Institute of Justice. (2008). Sex Trafficking: Identifying Cases and Victims. U.S. Department of Justice.

Hossain, M., Zimmerman, C., Abas, M., Light, M., & Watts, C. (2010). The Relationship of Trauma to Mental Disorders Among Trafficked and Sexually Exploited Girls and Women. American Journal of Public Health, 100(12), 2442–2449.

Ottisova, L., Hemmings, S., Howard, L. M., Zimmerman, C., & Oram, S. (2016). Prevalence and risk of violence and the mental, physical and sexual health problems associated with human trafficking. BJPsych Open.

Oram, S., Abell, J., Howard, L. M., & Zimmerman, C. (2016). Mental health and human trafficking: Responding to survivors’ needs. BJPsych International, 13(4), 79–81.

Varma, S., Gillespie, S., McCracken, C., & Greenbaum, V. J. (2015). Characteristics of child commercial sexual exploitation and sex trafficking victims presenting for medical care. Child Abuse & Neglect, 44, 98–105.

Personality, Schemas, and Attachment

Davis, A. C., Vaillancourt, T., & Arnocky, S. (2020). The Dark Tetrad and Exploitative Sexual Behavior. Frontiers in Psychology, 11, 577171.

Birkás, B., Láng, A., & Meskó, N. (2020). Openness to sex-for-resources exchanges, Dark Triad traits, and sociosexuality. University of Pécs.

Shareh, H. (2016). Early Maladaptive Schemas and Psychosocial Adjustment in Prostitutes. Practice in Clinical Psychology, 4(4), 255–262.

Karatzias, T., et al. (2016). An investigation of the childhood experiences of disconnection and rejection in relation to BPD features. Clinical Psychology & Psychotherapy, 23(3), 198–206.

Cultural and Cross-Cultural Context

Twentyfour-Seven Inc. (2023–2024). Twentyfour-Seven Human Trafficking Statistical Analysis. Clewiston, FL.

Hattie, B., et al. (2023). Men Who Perform Cunnilingus: Personality, Attitudinal, and Demographic Correlates. Journal of Sex Research.

Galbarczyk, A., et al. (2024). Mate value discrepancy and oral sex performance. Archives of Sexual Behavior.

Ipolyi, D., Láng, A., & Meskó, N. (2021). Extrinsic motivations and transactional sexual relationships. University of Pécs.