| Summary: | Title: The men we don’t see, and the women we can’t hear: A qualitative interview study about prostitution and human trafficking in hotel environment. This qualitative interview study aims to put a light on hotel staff’s experiences of how prostitution and human trafficking exist within their workplaces. We examine this on the basis of the Swedish policy ‘Hotellkurage’ as a crime prevention method in the hotel environment in Northern Sweden. The policy is built on the idea of civil courage and aims to include both hotel staff and hotel guests. Thematic analysis was used to collect data and code it to themes describing similarities, differences and patterns in the data. The theoretical framework for this thesis is based on the routine activity theory, the bystander effect, the emotional labor theory, and the halo effect within stereotypes. By interviewing six informants with different work positions we discovered that it seems to be hard for the hotel staff to intervene based on their gut feeling in situations involving violence. We also found that there is an underlying expectation on hotel staff to have knowledge about handling situations of prostitution and/or human trafficking, and cope with their personal emotions through out emotional labor. The role conflict of being service-minded and intervene in situations involving prostitution or human trafficking are severe. The organizational conditions, response from the management and the cooperation with local police seem to be crucial in order to use methods based on civil courage in hotel staff’s working environment. Hotel staff should be more educated and encouraged to act upon their gut feeling in situations involving prostitution and human trafficking. Finally, the study finds that stereotypes of perpetrators in prostitution and human trafficking usually don’t add up to the stereotypical view of a perpetrator due to their often common apperance. Also, the victims of prostitution and human trafficking are viewed in a stereotypical way, which leads to a higher ...
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