Some of the United States’ best-known hotel franchises have served as the backdrop to sex-trafficking crimes for decades, a new investigation by The New Yorker and Berkeley Journalism’s Investigative Reporting Program found. Now, a novel legal strategy is seeking to help survivors hold hotel corporations legally accountable for crimes committed on their premises.
In a 2018 Polaris Survivor Survey cited in the article, more than 60% of sex-trafficking victims said they were forced to sell sex from hotels.
“We focus not enough on how human trafficking intersects with the legitimate economy,” Louise Shelley, director of George Mason University’s Terrorism, Transnational Crime, and Corruption Center, said. “This is one of the key points in the supply chain where it does.”