Eyes On Crime

Get Trained And Join The Fight Against Sex Trafficking

Sex trafficking is happening in your community. It is happening in broad daylight. Victims are traveling through your town, they are stopping at your restaurants, your gas stations and staying at your hotels. So why haven’t you seen them? It is simple… because you likely do not know what to look for.

Hotel and restaurant employees are uniquely situated in a way that gives them an advantage to helping stop this horrific crime. Restaurant employees interact with potentially hundreds of people each day. Trafficking is a transient crime, these predators and victims are frequently on the move, but they still must eat. While simultaneously these predators use hotels of all statures to carry out their crimes due to the privacy and anonymity that the hospitality industry naturally offers. Meaning that both types of employees will very likely come in contact with this crime throughout their tenure within the industries.

Sex trafficking is a complex crime; however, the indicators are not. Once you understand how these predators operate and the common red flags associated with this crime you increase your chances of identifying trafficking and being able to properly report it drastically.

April is National Child Abuse Awareness month, and you may be wondering why a counter trafficking organization takes the time to draw attention to child abuse. Previous abuse is one of the key factors that can make someone more vulnerable to being trafficked. Multiple studies estimate that 70-90 percent of sexually exploited children have a history of child abuse.

These two crimes are so closely related that on May 29, 2015, President Obama signed the Justice for Victims of Trafficking Act of 2015. This bill amended the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act to require states to include sex trafficking within their definitions of child abuse and neglect.

You likely would do anything to stop a child from being abused if you witnessed it. Sex trafficking should trigger the same response within you. Imagine with me now that you are working a late shift, and a gentleman and two young teenage girls arrive at your place of work. The girls do not look excited to be there, in fact they look quite nervous. One has a pretty significant bruise on her arm and the other will not make eye contact with you. Something in your gut is telling you that this situation is off, but you are not quite sure why or what to do.

Being trained to recognize potential situations of trafficking will give you the tools to view that situation differently. It will equip you with the resources necessary to properly report the incident and potentially save those girls lives from the abuse and exploitation they are likely experiencing.

Law enforcement has described the value of a report to Guardian Group like this, imagine your home gets broken into but nothing is really taken so you do not report it. Then the same thing happens to your neighbor, and they also do not report it. Yet both you and your neighbor expect law enforcement to make sure this person is stopped. How is law enforcement supposed to stop this person from breaking in if they do not know it happened? As a hotel or restaurant employee, you could be the report that law enforcement needs to stop a predator.

Imagine how quickly we could stop these exploiters if communities were trained to recognize and report this crime. With so many eyes looking for these victims it would make it much more difficult for these predators to exploit their victims in plain sight. Get trained and join the fight against sex trafficking by being another set of eyes in your community.

Understanding trafficking and having the courage to report it could potentially save a life.  GUARDIAN GROUP

“A hotel is supposed to be a safe place where you can have your family there, and in the next room there’s a young girl being taken advantage of by 10, 15, 20 men in one night.”

- Sex Trafficking Survivor

ABOUT Guardian Seal® Training is the nation’s most effective, survivor- informed, actionable human trafficking training for the hospitality industry The online training can be accomplished in 30 minutes on average and employees can print their own certificate. Visit www.guardiangroup.org/hotel or email contact@guardiangroup.org.