SEATTLE, —Seattle’s World Cup Organizing Committee is taking on a different type of challenge as the event approaches: sex and human trafficking.
Seattle is expected to draw around 750,000 visitors for the 2026 FIFA World Cup matches and associated events. However, among all the celebrations and busy preparation, there’s an underlying fear that trafficking victims may be among those numbers.
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“I do think that there is a lot of awareness around large events that human trafficking increases when there are large events. It’s also something that comes up being a port city, the way that we are being a point of entry from a lot of different parts of the world, and it’s something when we talk even to indigenous organizations and tribes,” said Leo Flor, who is the committee’s Chief Legacy Officer.
Flor and colleagues are now sponsoringfree workshopsto help employers prevent human trafficking before, during, and after the games.
“Our legal statute defines human trafficking is any act of labor that’s compelled through force, fraud, or coercion, and any act of commercial sex compelled through force, fraud, or coercion,” said Kirsten Foot, the CEO and Executive Director of BEST, which stands for Businesses Ending Slavery and Trafficking.
She’s helping to coordinate the workshops that provide tips and tools for identifying whether someone is in crisis and ways to help alert the proper authorities.
“We want hotel workers, restaurant workers, temporary security guards, to be able to see the signs of human trafficking, recognize them as they’re happening,” she said.
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Foot makes the argument that human trafficking is tied to organized retail theft. The connection was made by Senator Chuck Grassley (R) , Iowa, in congressional hearings earlier this year.
ThePort of Seattlehas already created a program to address the issue, and says a QR code system that was posted on the waterfront and in the airport led to 1082 scans in 14 different languages in 2024.
“It’s not just with big events, but it certainly gets worse when sort of large numbers of people come together for short-term fun, and that can take a wrong and bad turn in the form of human trafficking and sex trafficking, that’s really what we’re trying to get ahead of,” said Flor.
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