The past few decades have witnessed several “moral panics” with regards to human trafficking that have concentrated on the issue of commercial sex work and prostitution. Though these debates have taken place at the policy and discursive level, anthropologists have been active in drawing upon ethnographic fieldwork with those labeled as ‘trafficked’ to contrast policies with the realities of lived experience. While anthropologists have conducted research in EuroAmerica, East, South and Southeast Asia, anthropological research addressing sex work in the Middle East has been limited, despite the fact that the Middle East features prominently in both policy and discourse. This presentation draws on ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2004 and 2010 with commercial sex workers and their clients in Dubai and Abu Dhabi, as well as a review of discourse and policy documents to highlight the contrasts between discourse and policy on the one hand, and the reality of lived experiences of sex work, migration and labor in the United Arab Emirates. Within the discourse, constructions of 'trafficked victim' and ‘victimizer’ are highly gendered, raced and sexualized. When applied to the Middle East, these conversations take a distincitively orientalist turn in casting Arab and Iranian men as villanous and vorcacious consumers of sex work (for a recent example see the Hollywood blockbuster hit Taken about a global human trafficking scheme whose main leaders are Arab men living in the Gulf), and Middle Eastern women as decidedly lacking in agency. This paper uses anthropological research to contextualize and critically analyze the global construction of human trafficking, and the inferiorizing logic that undergirds many ‘interventions’ and policies designed to address the issue in the Middle East.