Tour Guide Breaks Guinness Record to Fight Human Trafficking

PHOTO: Barnaby Davies on the verge of the record breaking leg of a trip that include seven capital cities in 24 hours. Davies wanted to use the trip to publicize the plight of nearly 30 million modern-day slaves. (Photo courtesy Barnaby Davies)

Barnaby Davies, a tour guide, just broke the Guinness World Record for the most national capital cities visited within 24 hours. Davies beat the previous record by one city, visiting London; Paris; Brussels;  Ljubljana, Slovenia; Vienna; Bratislava, Slovakia; and Budapest, Hungary between 12:25 p.m. April 15 and 11:35 p.m. April 16, in 23 hours and 30 minutes total. But in the case of Davies, winning a world record is only a small part of the story.

“I’ve done it,” Davies told TravelPulse. “It’s lodged now, the claim with the Guinness World Records office in London. They’ve acknowledged receipt of it. I can’t actually tell everybody I am a Guinness World Record holder until they officially declare it, which could take up to three months. It probably won’t take anywhere near that, but they get so many claims.”

The Real Story

As rare as it is to win a Guinness World Record, for Davies it is almost a footnote. Much more important for Davies than getting the glory of beating a world record was the chance to bring attention to a problem that few are aware of, at least of the extent of the problem and how horrific it is.

“Human trafficking is going on right under our noses in daylight hours,” said Davies. “People are being trafficked on planes and buses and trains all the time. It’s absolutely everywhere, 161 countries are involved. That’s the scope of its global impact. Eighty-three percent of the human trafficking in the U.S. is American citizens. People regard it as a foreign problem, Filipinos coming in by container, but it really isn’t. Every nation is involved.”

According to ECPAT (End Child Prostitution and Trafficking), an organization leading the fight against child sex trafficking, 1.2 million children are trafficked every  year. According to the Polaris Project, 27 million people are now held in modern-day slavery.

Davies mind reeled when he heard the numbers. “Between 21 and 30 million people are enslaved in the world today,” said Davies. “The reason that figure got me is that vastly dwarfs the entire number of African slaves shipped to the Americas in the 16 and 1700s. Incredible. I can’t believe it’s still going on in 2014. 1888 was supposed to be the abolition of slavery, but that’s not the case at all. It’s sickening.”

But even more devastating than the numbers were the anecdotal reports.

“One of the reasons this resonated with me so much is that I am a father,” said Davies. “I have a three and a half-year old child. You hear these stories. There was a fairgrounds attraction, and there was a child there and the mother turned round and the three year old was gone. The park got shut down and literally within 15 minutes that child’s head had been shaved, all the clothes were changed and it was put in another buggy. That child was going out of the park if they had been successful. As a father it makes you want to cry.”

Unfortunately, such stories are only too common. Search for “child abducted at fairgrounds” and Google will accommodate you with 134 million results.  

Spreading Awareness through the Travel Industry

Last year the International Tour Management Institute (ITMI), an educational institution for tour guides, signed on to ECPAT’s Code of Conduct for the Protection of Children from Sexual Exploitation in Travel and Tourism. Marilyn Carlson Nelson, chairman and former CEO of Carlson, spoke at the signing ceremony, saying, “The travel and hospitality industry is in a unique position to address this problem and we all have a responsibility to do so.” Carlson’s 170,000 employees in 150 countries are trained to detect and try to deter the sexual exploitation of children in tourism. According to a statement from ITMI, “Front desk hotel employees, for example, are encouraged to look for visual clues like signs of abuse or fear among potential victims; young people made up to look older; and clients who pay with cash, are reluctant to provide identification or have no luggage.”

According to Davies, “ECPAT is trying to get everyone in travel to sign the code and have in-house training so they can make everybody in the service industry aware, which actually cuts it down. If everyone knows what is going on and what to look for, it becomes harder and harder for traffickers to use public transport.”

Victims are not always taken against their will exactly, Davies says. “It’s not necessarily against their will; you’re picking somebody vulnerable, often young women. People are posing as boyfriends and before they know it they’ve been moved. They perhaps think they are going to a better place. They don’t fully understand where they’re going, which is why people should be looking out on planes, particularly on airlines, staff being trained to look for people who may not know their destination, or say the father who is allegedly with a child and doesn’t know the child’s name, obvious things like that.”

And it is not always for the sex trades. “People are also being trafficked for labor and also for their organs,” said Davies. The whole story is “so unbelievable that people probably don’t believe it. Until I took that course I was not aware of how prevalent it is.”  

Before he took the course, Davies was among the uninformed on the issue. “Like everyone else I guess, I’d been walking around thinking this is a foreign problem. We get a few hostages in containers, and that’s not good, but not something I’m going to lose sleep over. But then I did a bit of research.”

Goodbye to Madonna and Beyonce

Like most people, Davies had not gotten around to learning about the issue before he took the course about it from ITMI. He had only just switched careers. Previous to being a tourguide, he was an equipment manager, a.k.a. a roadie for international tours of popstars such as Madonna, Beyonce and Metallica. The job is almost as complicated as being a tour guide, including taking on such tasks as “negotiating Roman amphitheatres for Lou Reed, delays at the Russian border for Madonna; staying awake from Zagreb to London for U2 etc.”

He spent 16 years in the industry starting with the Beastie Boys in 1998. But he was wearying of that kind of work, wanting to spend more time with his 3 year old. It was during his training at ITMI that he learned about human trafficking.

Breaking a world record was incidental.

“It started as simply wanting to beat a world record,” said Davies. “It’s kind of like in the words of Sir George Mallory when he was asked why he wanted to go to up Everest he said, ‘Because it’s there.’ That’s how it started. But because I had learned about human trafficking with ITMI, it really resonated and struck a chord with me, and I realized that this could be quite a high profile opportunity to get some awareness and some donations to combat human trafficking.”