Skip to footer

Nuns pose as prostitutes to save victims of sex trafficking

The international team of 1,100 religious sisters currently operates in 80 countries and seeks to combat human trafficking and slavery.

|
Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images
Anti-slavery activists rally outside Parliament on October 18, 2013 in London, England.

Human trafficking is a grave problem.

According to the International Labor Organization, nearly 21 million people, including children, live in slavery worldwide, many of them trafficked by gangs for sex work and unskilled labor.

A network of nuns is doing whatever it takes to solve the problem, according to its chairman.

The group, known as Talitha Kum take actions that include dressing up like prostitutes to infiltrate brothels worldwide in an effort to rescue victims of sex trafficking. 

The initiative launched in 2004 by British investment banker John Studzinski, consists of 1,100 sisters, and currently operates from 80 countries.  

“I’m not trying to be sensational, but I’m trying to underscore the fact this is a world that has lost innocence ... where dark forces are active,” Studzinski, a vice chairman of US investment bank The Blackstone Group recently he told the Trust Women Conference on women's rights and trafficking hosted by the Thomson Reuters Foundation. “These are problems caused by poverty and equality, but it goes well beyond that.”

Besides going undercover as sex workers and rescuing trafficking victims, the team has also been raising money to buy children who are sold into slavery by their parents in places like Africa, Asia, and South America.

“This is a new network of houses for children around the world who would otherwise be sold into slavery. It is shocking but it is real,” Studzinksi said, according to Reuters.

Human trafficking for labor, as defined by a US federal law in 2000, is “the recruitment, harboring, transportation, provision, or obtaining of a person for labor or services, through the use of force, fraud, or coercion for the purpose of subjection to involuntary servitude, peonage, debt bondage, or slavery.” A parallel definition applies to sex trafficking and coerced prostitution.

In October, the largest-ever FBI sex trafficking sting operation arrested 150 perpetrators and rescued children being exploited in 135 cities across the nation, The Christian Science Monitor reported.

The full scope of human sex trafficking is notoriously difficult to track, but the Polaris Project, an organization that works to raise awareness of modern slavery and rehabilitate its victims, said they received 3,598 reports of sex trafficking in the US in 2014. 

About one in six of the children reported to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children are trapped in sexual slavery, the agency reported, up from one in seven in 2013. 

In the resent past, civil authorities and non-profit organizations have joined efforts to combat the scourge of human trafficking and forms of modern-day slavery. 

But the work of Talitha Kum does have critics. 

According to Christina Arnold, founder and CEO of Prevent Human Trafficking, the group of nuns, while they mean well, “May be doing more harm than good.”

“When you buy the victim, you just drive up the cost for brothel owners or traffickers trying to sell in the future,” Ms. Arnold said.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.
editor@csmonitor.com
Subscribe
Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

Subscribe to insightful journalism

QR Code to Nuns pose as prostitutes to save victims of sex trafficking
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/World/Global-News/2015/1202/Nuns-pose-as-prostitutes-to-save-victims-of-sex-trafficking
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe