Pappu
Friday, July 12, 2024
Reading Time: 2 minutes
The American Hotel & Lodging Association (AHLA) Interim President & CEO Kevin Carey released the following statement today regarding the introduction of the Human Trafficking Awareness Training Recognition Act, which mandates the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to establish a certification program for businesses that train their employees to recognize and respond to suspected human trafficking.
“The Human Trafficking Awareness Training Recognition Act would complement our industry’s anti-trafficking efforts by providing important third-party validation for hotels’ training and prevention initiatives,” said AHLA Interim President & CEO Kevin Carey. “We are grateful to Reps. Valadao and Carter for introducing this important bill and look forward to helping them pass it into law.”
Background
The Human Trafficking Awareness Training Recognition Act, introduced this week by Reps. David Valadao (R-Calif.) and Troy Carter (D-La.), enables DHS to certify businesses that have trained their employees to combat human trafficking. These businesses can publicly display these annual certifications, which would be issued by the Blue Campaign at the DHS Center for Countering Human Trafficking, an initiative aimed at raising public awareness of human trafficking.
AHLA, its members, and the AHLA Foundation are dedicated to preventing trafficking, with hotels being at the forefront of these efforts for many years. Since 2019, the No Room for Trafficking (NRFT) initiative has partnered with PACT (formerly ECPAT-USA) to distribute free trafficking-prevention training for hotel employees. These trainings educate hotel staff on identifying and responding to signs of trafficking and are supplemented by AHLA Foundation resources that explain how to display human trafficking indicator signage in hotels, establish company-wide policies, coordinate with law enforcement, and share success stories and best practices.
To date, the three available training modules have been completed over 1.6 million times, with thousands trained annually. These numbers do not include additional anti-trafficking training efforts by AHLA members, which vary in length and frequency. In 2022, the AHLA Foundation announced expanded efforts to support trafficking survivors through the industry’s first-ever Survivor Fund, which has raised $3.7 million since its inception. As part of its ongoing commitment to this cause, the AHLA Foundation is matching NRFT Survivor Fund contributions up to $5 million, with a goal of $10 million in total contributions.
“Through the AHLA Foundation’s No Room for Trafficking initiative, the hotel industry is united in the effort to prevent human trafficking and support survivors,” said AHLA Foundation President Anna Blue. “The collective impact of the industry can accelerate innovative human trafficking prevention efforts and upstream strategies to make a positive difference in the communities where we work and live.”
