A s it has become clear over the last few years that sex trafficking takes place on every continent O. Runaways , girls who have fallen for the wrong guy and naive women who have traveled from another country on the promise of a legitimate job can get trapped in prostitution rings anywhere.
One front in this battle has been the hotel industry. Traffickers like to use hotels to ply their trade, since they can get in and make some money and then move on before they attract too much attention. Neighbors tend to take a dim view of brothels and report them to the authorities. Perhaps because of this, some hoteliers were early activists in the anti-trafficking cause, including Marilyn Carlson Nelson, the former chairman of the chain which owns a bunch of hotels including the Park Plaza, Country Inns and Suites and all the different types of Radisson.
One of the key times is at check in. Paying with cash is obviously a cause for concern, especially if the reservation was originally made with a credit card. A bunch of guys checking in with two young Latvian women alarmed this hotel employee , who went called the cops on them and broke up a trafficking ring. For hotels, the next line of defense after a vigilant front desk clerk is the in-house security team.
Sometimes traffickers will check in to the room and only much later smuggle the girls and the johns into the hotel through a side door. Rooms which are being used by traffickers typically have a lot of men coming and going, and sometimes have men congregating outside the door, in the lobby or in the parking lot. The hotel housekeepers are key players here too, since traffickers tend to decline cleaning services for days on end. Stanoch says people who are having consensual sex generally tend to be neater with their paraphernalia.
Who knew? Cleaners are also trained to watch out for a large number of computers or cell phones in a room. If one room is watching an unusual amount of porn on their hotel TV, that can trigger suspicions especially if it happens in tandem with other signs of trafficking.
