The urgency Pat Zerega feels about the issue of child sex tourism springs from an incident that occurred many years ago — long before she became director of corporate social responsibility for the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America.

When she was a college student, Zerega worked as a maid in a hotel to help pay her educational expenses. One day, while tidying up a guest’s room, she came across scores of negatives of a little girl in sexually explicit poses. She wanted to help, but she didn’t know what to do, or who to call. Finally, reluctantly, she put the negatives back, and kept cleaning.

That memory motivates Zerega to ask particularly pointed questions of
hotel chains when discussing the need for them to take a stand against child sex tourism—and train their employees concerning the issue. “Would your workers know who to call if a maid found such pictures? Would they be in a position to help a little girl, or a little boy? You’re part of the tourism industry, so what have you done to combat this?” Zerega says she asks. “Too often, their reaction is, ‘We don’t have any hotel chains in Thailand,’” a country considered the linchpin of the commercial sex trade in Asia.

The Evangelical Lutheran Church, along with other ICCR members, has
initiated shareholder dialogues to encourage companies to grapple with child sex tourism and its evil twin, human trafficking, a crime rooted in profiteering in both commercial sex as well as forced labor.

Together, the two issues involve the enslavement of millions of people.
Modern slavery surfaced in America in a high-profile, public way in August of 1995, when local, state and federal law enforcement officers raided a garment factory in El Monte, California. They freed dozens of immigrant workers who had labored behind barbed wire and spiked fences for years, held against their will and forced to live among roaches and rodents. The incident confronted U.S. citizens with the ugly reality that modern-day slavery still exists, even here.

When ICCR members file shareholder resolutions to focus attention on
these issues, corporations are quick to ask that the resolutions be withdrawn, in return for company steps to fight the problem.

“This is one example where shareholder resolutions make an enormous difference,” said Harry Van Buren, consultant on social responsibility for the Episcopal Church. “Once a shareholder resolution is filed, the corporation is faced with a choice of dealing with the resolution, or writing a statement in opposition to it. The resolution starts the dialogue,” he said, saying that it confronts the reluctance of corporations to talk about an issue that makes them profoundly uncomfortable.

ICCR got involved in fighting the child sex trade in 2005, when a member, Swedish pension fund GES Investment Services, wanted help in getting answers from Marriott concerning a case that took place in Costa Rica.

“We helped facilitate the filing of a shareholder resolution at Marriott,” said Lauren Compere, director of shareholder advocacy with ICCR member Boston Common Asset Management. “It took them (Marriott) a little while, but ultimately they said they didn’t want this to go to the ballot.”

Marriott responded to the prospect of a resolution by establishing a human rights task force across departments to deal with child sex tourism. Because the company acted, ICCR members withdrew the shareholder resolution. Since then, ICCR’s working group on human trafficking and the child sex trade has engaged about a half-dozen hotels, several airlines and a few cruise ships to overhaul their policies and train their employees.

Sr. Kathleen Coll, administrator for shareholder advocacy for Catholic Health East, said a dialogue is a first step. She’s focused her energy on raising awareness with airlines, and started by writing letters to US Airways.The company responded by sending one of its staff attorneys to attend a symposium on the problem and put a full page ad in its in-flight magazines publicizing the problem of human trafficking during the month of September, 2008 — an ad which would normally have been worth well over $20,000.
 
“I keep thinking about the whole issue of domestic violence, and how
twenty-five years ago it wasn’t talked about,” Sr. Kathleen said. “A company like US Air often doesn’t know about these issues. We’re asking them to be aware, and asking them to raise awareness,” she said.

Dan Cravens, US Airways vice president for investor relations, said that Sr. Kathleen’s letter was the first time in at least three years that anyone had brought up the issue. The way to make the problem more public, the company thought, was to donate an ad.

“With all the different competing interests, the best way to support this
cause is to take the message to the passengers. We wanted to be a good corporate citizen, and raise awareness on this very important issue,” Cravens said. Still, the company has no current plans to do anything more, said Jim Olson, US Airways communications director. “We felt the ad was the best use of our limited resources,” he said.

Transportation companies are fielding more shareholder questions as the world gets smaller, and ease of travel increases. “Child sex trafficking and tourism is the downside of globalization,” Van Buren said. “People involved have to fly places and stay at hotels.” That makes it all the more important that members approach the companies involved in the travel industry and ask about their policies. Van Buren said that the Episcopal Church approached Starwood Hotels in 2006, and Continental Airlines last year.

Starwood responded by initiating a human rights policy that repudiated
child sex tourism and agreed to train staff, which advocates say is critical.

“It’s easy to write a statement that nobody reads,” Van Buren said. ICCR
members want companies to go beyond policies that, once written, can too easily be forgotten. The issue requires more than words.

Among other things, a proactive corporate response requires an ability to untangle issues as they become more complicated—especially concerning labor, where a supply chain may involve many different vendors. Some companies, said Compere, have discovered that the first several layers of their supply chain have above-board labor practices, but there might be a problem with labor trafficking in the fourth tier. “That’s when you have to do training, ongoing education and awareness and auditing [work] situations,” said Compere.

Some companies have also looked at alternative youth employment as a way to fight human trafficking, she said. Marriott, for example, decided not just to work on keeping its sites from becoming involuntary hosts for such activity, but pushed their sites to offer employment for young, at-risk people as a way of fostering a prevention strategy.

Branka Minic, director for global corporate affairs for Manpower, agreed
that such an approach is necessary.

 “The root cause of all this is poverty,” she said. If people have enough money to support themselves and their families, “they won’t be vulnerable to the sweet stories of someone who says he will help them get jobs in other countries,” only to find themselves trapped into prostitution and forced labor.

Unlike companies in Europe, a hallmark of American companies’ approach to the issue of child sex tourism and human trafficking is a reluctance to sign on to codes of conduct, such as those written by ECPAT (End Child Prostitution, Child Pornography and Trafficking of Children for Sexual Purposes). Despite the fact that hundreds of companies all over the world have signed the code, only a few are in the United States.

“They would rather write their own than sign somebody else’s,” Van Buren said. “There is this cultural set of issues, and a kind of arrogance that says we can’t learn from any other country.”

Yet Minic said that some companies, like Manpower, have signed the United Nations principles concerning these issues rather than those of ECPAT, and that not signing a code doesn’t necessarily mean corporations are not concerned. More than anything, they need guidance, she said. “Companies are somewhat challenged even if they care about this issue, facing questions of‘What do I do?’ ‘How do I start?’”

Minic, who spoke at ICCR’s gathering in September, speaks with passion about the need to address these problems. Yet even a company such as Manpower, which is anxious to help reduce the incidence of both child sex tourism and slavery, is sometimes daunted by the task.

With a network that spans the globe involving thousands of businesses and individuals, educating and raising awareness is time-consuming, said Minic.

“Global supply chains have become very complicated,” she said. “Still, in the last several years this issue has become very important. Education is a process. We want [our contractors] to travel with us on this issue.”

The full issue of this Corporate Examiner can be purchased from our online store.