No, it actually is.
The whole story that the Bradleys are telling depends critically on the existence of a conspiracy that would not only carry off risky actions like kidnapping an American tourist from her cruise ship, but would turn go on to keep her in custody for years on end and even let her do hugely risky things like take foreign trips.
We need to prove the existence of this sort of conspiracy. The problem with doing that is that nothing like that has happened. Sex trafficking targets people who are vulnerable, falling into categories of vulnerability that Amy either did not fall into at all or fell into only marginally (she was upset with her family, yes, but she was hardly being groomed by an older boyfriend).
Moreover, Amy disappeared even before she got to a Curaçao that is not only relatively stable but had and has fairly stable patterns of recruiting women for sex work from nearby countries. She was not backpacking in rural Haiti without a cell phone.
I think it interesting to contrast Amy's experience with that of Jacqueline Vienneau. It does seem as if she made some mistakes, for instance travelling by herself, and not staying in regular contact. Syria kay not have been the best place to travel solo for a young woman, although it is worth noting that Syrians seem to have been almost uniformly appalled that one of their number betrayed their hospitality. Still, it just takes one person.
Amy was not in Jacqueline's position.
As I have said before, I think that if Amy did not fall, it is most likely that she was attacked. This does not mean that she was sex trafficked. That actually might have been barely imaginable in the case of Jacqueline, who had been visiting a country where deep internal divides and external conflicts exploded into civil war just four years after her death. ISIS there even conducted sex trafficking of women belonging to minority and unpopular groups, even Western women.
This is not likely in the case of Amy: Curaçao has had some difficulties negotiating its relationship with its past, with the Netherlands and with the other Dutch Caribbean islands, but the island has nothing like Syria's potential for violence. Imagining the sort of conspiracy there that would keep an abducted American tourist imprisoned as a sex slave for years on end is really hard. (Even harder would be imagining such a conspiracy that let her take trips abroad.)
It is also worth noting that the sex trafficking thing seems to be a product of the Bradleys' unhappiness with Amy's sexual orientation. "My daughter must be attractive to men, and would be attractive, if only she did not keep presenting herself as a lesbian." I am willing to bet that, in a slightly different timeline where Amy was straight and still disappeared, the Bradleys' attention would have a different focus, perhaps on the issue of balcony safety, perhaps in the issue of crew safety. The family's inability to imagine Amy as heterosexual even in the worst possible circumstances would not have manifested.
www.fbi.gov
nypost.com
www.refworld.org
