MPI to Sign The Code, a Pledge to Combat Human Trafficking
April 4, 2019April 4, 2019, will be an important day in MPI’s history, as the organization will become a signatory to “The Code,” an important document—and pledge—by a global network of associations and corporations committed to taking significant actions in the worldwide fight against human trafficking.
MPI’s original commitment to this cause came in 2017, when President and CEO Paul Van Deventer, who will be signing The Code on behalf of MPI, heard Sister Kathleen Bryant, a Religious Sister of Charity from Los Angeles and a board member of the U.S. Catholic Sisters Against Human Trafficking, address an MPI International Board of Directors meeting.
“I was moved by the plight of these innocent victims—many of them young children—and realized that I had a responsibility and an opportunity to help,” Van Deventer would later write in The Meeting Professional, the monthly magazine of MPI. (The Meeting Professional has featured many articles about the fight against human trafficking since the beginning of 2018.)
MPI soon embraced the cause, becoming involved with the U.S. affiliate of ECPAT (End Child Prostitution and Trafficking), a network of organizations in more than 90 countries with one common mission: to eliminate the sexual exploitation of children.
ECPAT-USA has been around since 1991 and has been enlisting hotels, airlines and other fundamental components of the travel industry into the fight. The reason for this is that most of the human trafficking involves moving women and children around the globe, often to be used as sex slaves, with “customers” being accommodated inside hotel rooms.
Recently, ECPAT-USA hit upon the idea of recruiting professional groups within the meeting industry to join in the worldwide movement to fight human trafficking. It was something of a match made in heaven when MPI and ECPAT-USA came together.
To read the full article by Rowland Stiteler on MPI: Click Here