Scandic Hotels have decided to provide their staff with education regarding questions of prostitution. RealStars have been working together with Scandic Hotels for a long time through the project Hotels Against Trafficking, and we think that this is very exciting news.
Today, many of the Swedish sex purchases are made at hotels. This is something that very rarely is discussed and it is far from given that hotel staff is provided with education and knowledge about the problem.
Simon Häggström is a criminal investigator at the Police’s prostitution group in Stockholm, and you can see him in the news feature above. Simon says that in the Stockholm area, around 250-300 women are sold on the internet on a regular weekday.
Through education, the hotel staff can be provided with actual tools to actively act against the purchasing of sex, and in the long run – prostitution. It can be hard for the staff to know if what they are seeing at their hotels is prostitution or not, of course. If they see something suspicious, however, they can turn to the Police’s prostitution group for support.
RealStars have been working with several big hotels and will continue to develop this cooperation regionally during 2015 through other parts of the tourism industry.