The British Columbia Restaurant & Foodservices Association (BCRFA) is urging restaurants in Metro Vancouver to participate in a human trafficking training ahead of the summer, when thousands are expected to visit during the FIFA World Cup.
The association says it wants to raise awareness of the crime to prevent it from happening in Vancouver and offers two seminars to workers in the hospitality business in cooperation with the Human Trafficking Prevention Network of British Columbia.
Ian Tostenson, CEO of the BCRFA, tells 1130 NewsRadio that large international events require extra vigilance when it comes to human trafficking.
“We feel that it’s such an important topic to raise awareness that putting that into our guide to make sure that people are aware of human trafficking and how extensive it is throughout the world,” he said.
With over 200,000 workers in the provincial restaurant sector, Tostenson hopes that the tools taught in the training will help staff spot the warning signs during this summer’s events.
“I was really quite surprised [at] the amount of human traffic there actually is. I always thought that human trafficking was somebody who brought somebody from another country, but it’s not. It happens right here,” he added.
“We think of human trafficking as an international sort of trafficking, but it could be domestic, and it can be in the form of sexual human trafficking or labour trafficking where people prey on the vulnerable.”
However, the Supporting Women’s Alternatives Network (SWAN) in Vancouver has some hesitations as it warns that anti-trafficking campaigns often negatively affect marginalized communities.
“For our community, we have only seen a handful of human trafficking cases,” SWAN spokesperson Cystyal Ladaers tells 1130 NewsRadio.
“It appears that for our community, they are actually harmed more by these sorts of anti-trafficking initiatives that encourage people to call police.”
She adds that those campaigns tend to lead to racial profiling and negatively affect sex workers.
“In some cases, it has seemed to cause a lot of racial profiling. It encourages people to surveil others in public and have the belief that trafficking is around every corner.
Laderas stresses the need for support for human-trafficking survivors and also highlights the importance of sexual assault prevention during events like FIFA.
According to the RCMP, there were 43 reported cases of human trafficking in B.C in 2023; however, it assumes that many cases are unreported.
– With files from Raynaldo Suarez.