Hotel Staff in Mexico City Taught to Spot the Signs of Human Trafficking VOA News
go to original May 6, 2017

Learn some of the signs of what human trafficking looks like and you may be able to help stop it before it even begins. (ZOE Children)

An old man flanked by young women checks into a hotel, a customer books several rooms on the same floor and no one ever leaves the rooms, another brings guests and walks straight into the hotel lift without checking in.

These are all possible signs of human trafficking that hotel staff across Mexico City are being trained to spot and report.

An initiative between the Citizens Council of Mexico City, a civil society group, and the Mexico City Hotel Association, which brings together 251 hotels, aims to train at least 2,000 hotel staff this year across the capital.

Staff in at least six, mostly high-end hotels have been trained in trafficking since the initiative started in March, said Luis Wertman, head of the Citizens Council, which provides the training.

“We view the crime of human trafficking as a chain. And every chain is made up of several links. One of the most used links — tools — that traffickers have are hotels,” Wertman told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

“If you have trained people at the reception, at the front desk, the cleaners, housekeeping, anyone that works in the hotel, they can easily recognize when someone is in the hotel against their will.”

Hotel rooms can be used to film pornography, where women and children are sexually exploited, or a base for traffickers and their victims before victims are sold into sex or forced labor and transported to other parts of Mexico, Wertman said.

Read the rest at VOA News

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