Since 2000, trafficking in persons is internationally and uniformly defined in a UN Convention - the "Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons Especially Women and Children, Supplementing the United Nations Convention against Transnational Organized Crime."

A subsequent EU framework directive placed all member states under the obligation to change their national laws according to the UN guideline. Germany complied with this request in February 2005 by changes made to the German Criminal Law.

Since then, trafficking in persons is no longer a crime against sexual autonomy but a crime against the personal freedom of an individual. Section 232 of German Criminal Law (GCL) includes "Trafficking in Persons for the Purpose of Sexual Exploitation" and section 233 of GCL "Trafficking in Persons for the Purpose of Exploitation of Labor".

There is a lot of speculation concerning the quantitative dimension of this crime but all of these estimates are not and cannot really be reliable. The only knowledgeable figure for the Federal Republic of Germany is the one published in the annual report of the Federal Criminal Police Office on trafficking in persons (Lagebild Menschenhandel). However, these are only cases known to the police or such cases that at least led to preliminary investigations - i.e. the officially reported or registered cases known to the police. Therefore, these figures do not reveal anything about the estimated number of unknown cases and reliable estimates are not possible. Furthermore, there is a discrepancy to the case figures of counselling centers. Apart from the purely quantitative difference in the field of trafficking in persons there is also a discrepancy concerning the multiple countries of origin that do no find mentioning in the report on trafficking issued by the Federal Criminal Police. For example, we provided counselling to women from 24 countries who were affected by trafficking in the sex industry. In contrast, the 2007 report "Lagebild Menschenhandel" of the Federal Criminal Police Office only mentions 9 countries of origin of persons affected by trafficking.

Even though the wording of the laws is neutral concerning gender, at least trafficking in the sex industry is de facto trafficking of women. We must assume that the situation concerning trafficking into marriage is similar. As far as trafficking for the purpose of labor exploitation is concerned, there is currently no data that would shed light on the situation.