  Citation: Jeng, Chu-Chuan, Edward Huang, Sarah Meo, and Louise Shelley. 2022. Combating Sex Trafficking: The Role of the Hotel—Moral and Ethical Questions. Religions 13: 138. https://doi.org/ 10.3390/rel13020138 Academic Editor: Klaus Baumann Received: 22 October 2021 Accepted: 17 January 2022 Published: 2 February 2022 Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affil- iations. Copyright: © 2022 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/). religions Article Combating Sex Trafficking: The Role of the Hotel—Moral and Ethical Questions Chu-Chuan Jeng, Edward Huang , Sarah Meo and Louise Shelley * The Terrorism, Transnational Crime and Corruption Center (TraCCC), Schar School of Policy and Government, George Mason University, Arlington, VA 22201, USA; cjeng2@gmu.edu (C.-C.J.); chuang10@gmu.edu (E.H.); smeo2@gmu.edu (S.M.) * Correspondence: lshelley@gmu.edu Abstract: Legitimate companies are key facilitators of human trafficking. These corporate facilitators include not only websites providing advertisements for commercial sex services but also hotels and motels. Analysis of all active federal criminal sex trafficking cases in 2018 and 2019 reveals that in approximately 80% of these cases, victims were exploited at either hotels or motels. This paper studies the prevalence of the hospitality industry in the crime of sex trafficking and the failure of this industry to address this problem until recent civil suits were filed by victims against individual hotels and chains. Drawing on the civil cases filed in federal courts by victims of human trafficking between 2015 and 2021 along the East Coast of the United States, this paper assesses the characteristics of these hotels and the conditions in the hotels that facilitated sex trafficking. The paper then explores the moral and ethical problems posed by the facilitating role of hotel owners/operators in sex trafficking either through collusion or failure to act on and/or report evidence of individual abuse. Suggestions on how to address the problem are provided. Keywords: human trafficking; sex trafficking; illicit supply chain; hospitality industry; geographi- cal crime 1. Introduction The Trafficking Victims Protection Act passed in 2000 focused on the crime of human trafficking. But by 2008, the Reauthorization of the TVPA (William Wilberforce Traffick- ing Victims Protection Reauthorization Act 2008) recognized that there were more than criminal actors involved in human trafficking. The supply chains for human trafficking consisted not only of illicit actors but many from the legitimate economy. Provisions were introduced by Congress in 2008 in the Reauthorization of the TVPA to hold specific entities and individuals liable for civil damages if they derived “financial benefit from human trafficking” (Shavers 2012). Entities such as motels and hotels 1 as well as “massage parlors, restaurants, and even online platforms, that facilitate or financially benefit from a trafficking enterprise” have been sued only since 2015 even though this has been possible since 2008 (Sagduyu 2020). The significant number of hotels sued is not surprising considering the centrality of the hospitality industry to human trafficking, which has also been identified in hotline data. The human trafficking hotline in the United States run by the Polaris Project has identified hotels as key locales for both labor and sexual exploitation (Anthony et al. 2018). In the period from December 2007 through December 2017, 3596 instances of human trafficking involving a hotel or motel were reported through the National Human Trafficking Hotline (Anthony et al. 2018, p. 16). In a survey with 127 selected trafficking victims, 79% of those surveyed had contact with the hotel sector (Anthony et al. 2018, p. 12). Furthermore, the Human Trafficking Institute Reports for 2018 and 2019 indicated that in 81.5% (312) of federal criminal cases in 2018 and 80% (296) of federal criminal cases in 2019, a commercial sex act took place in a hotel (Feehs and Currier 2019, p. 14; Feehs and Currier 2020, p. 30). Religions 2022, 13, 138. https://doi.org/10.3390/rel13020138 https://www.mdpi.com/journal/religions