Presented by Sister Ann Teresa and Brother Des for CORI (NI) Belfast, Friday 25th April 2008

FIRST TALK

I would like to begin by thanking you for inviting Des and I to share with you what we are learning about trafficking and counter-trafficking, through our work in the Medaille Trust. We will begin with a short recording from ITV News (end of January 2008), which shows under-cover work done in the UK on trafficking.

We would also like to share (by DVD) a true story of a young woman who was trafficked to the UK a few years ago. This was a significant case which made the police aware of what was going on. As you listen to this story, please be aware that she is between 2-4 million women who are trafficked in our world every year.

ELENA'S STORY

Elena was from Lithuania. When she was 15 she had a phone call out of the blue giving her the opportunity of coming to the UK one summer to sell ice-cream. She was told that British people love their ice-cream and that young people were needed to sell it during the hot weather. Jobs were scarce in Lithuania and this seemed a wonderful opportunity of learning English, earning money and being able to send money home to help her family. The job would be for the summer holidays. The young man who phoned her told her that he and his friends would look after her.

This phone call was followed up by two girls aged about 18 who told Elena what the job would entail and they made it sound like a wonderful opportunity. They asked her parents to sign a consent form which they willingly did. She was driven from Lithuania to Latvia by car by an 18-year-old who told her how great life would be for her in Britain. She flew to Heathrow from Latvia on Baltic Airlines - a low cost airline. As soon as Elena had passed through Customs in Heathrow her passport was taken from her and 3 other people met her, 2 men and one woman.

On the day of her arrival in the UK Elena was sold for £4,000 in a café at Heathrow. She was then taken away and raped. After that she was taken to a brothel in Birmingham and had 5 clients on the first day. All the money went to her owner. She was taken to this brothel every day for 10 days. The girl was 15 and we can only imagine what she went through! After a while Blade got tired of her. He sold her on for £3,000 to a man called Gerry and taken to Leicester. In their eyes she was soiled goods because she was no longer a virgin and so her street value decreased. From there she was taken to London where she was sold again for £2,000 and raped on a regular basis for a few days by her new owner. She was sold 7 times in 3 months! But she managed to escape.

This was at the Kingdom Club where her owner was in the process of selling her on to someone else. She went into the toilets in the Club and local girls seeing how distressed she was, asked her what was wrong. These girls helped her to escape by distracting the men while she ran away and found a police station. Reflecting upon her ordeal she said: 'I have run out of tears .... I try to forget but sometimes I have nightmares about it.'

Each one of the 2-4 million people has dreams for her life, and each one of these women is totally betrayed. Like Elena, they believe that they are coming to a better situation and that they will be able to help their families.

It is estimated that there are 1.8 million child sex-slaves in the world today, 5,000 of whom are said to be in the UK.

Trafficking, the buying and selling of people is the fastest growing criminal international activity.

This map shows the trafficking routes and the source countries from which the 2 million women come. They come from the poorest parts of the world. The map shows that this cancer encompasses the whole world. Every country in the world is involved in trafficking. Each country is either a source, transit or destination country. Even though we celebrated the Bi-Centenary of the Abolition of Slavery last year, we have more slaves in our world today than ever before.

So what is the situation in the UK?
The Home Office gives the conservative estimate of 4000 women being sex-trafficked to the UK each year. Victor Malarek in 'The Natashas' says it is more likely to be 10,000 each year who are sex-trafficked to Britain. Recent BBC under-cover work into trafficking in Britain said that at any one time there were probably 25,000 trafficked people here. Until 2006 the only provision for these 10,000 women were 25 bed-spaces provided by Poppy Project. This is money provided by the Government. A year ago they were given funding for 10 move-on beds.

The difference between the numbers of trafficked people needing help and the small amount of help available, led to us forming The Medaille Trust.

The Story:
Our story began 10 years ago when I worked with women in street-based prostitution. During that time I also studied the roots of prostitution to see what was going on globally. In my reading and study I became increasingly aware of sex-trafficking, and of how the buying and selling of people into slavery was becoming very big business for criminals. Traffickers boast that they can sell arms and drugs once but can sell a woman or a child over and over again. They can make £100,000 on one woman in 6 months. I learned from Scotland Yard that sex-trafficked people were in all of our towns, villages and cities in the UK but that they are invisible. The police said that wherever they look they find, even in the most rural of places. I read many stories of the Elena's of this world who had been sold into slavery, and I longed to do something to help.

At the time my awareness was being raised about sex-trafficking, we as a community were on the streets 4 nights each week and we didn't see any trafficked women. They were enslaved in our city but they were invisible and voiceless. I wanted to do something and I imagined that most people, like me, believed that slavery had ended 200 years ago. One thing I could do was TALK, so I decided that I would speak in Churches to raise awareness about the enormity of this suffering. I was talking in Des's Parish when a generous catholic couple came forward and offered to buy a house which could be used to help women and children escape sex-trafficking. At the same time there were many other requests coming from different quarters asking me to become involved in trafficking work. I began to see this as a call from God inviting me to 'SET MY PEOPLE FREE'.

However when I thought through the practicalities of having only one Safe House, I realised that this would not be adequate. Women found in our city would need to go to another city for their safety and the safety of those working with them. We needed a network of houses and we didn't have enough funding to open even one house!

I had also been working ecumenically through CHASTE - Churches Alert to Sex Trafficking Across Europe. Carrie Pemberton, the Anglican Priest who established CHASTE always invited us to ROUND TABLE meetings, so that we were sharing with Anglicans, Baptists, Quakers, Evangelicals etc. And Anglican Evangelical and Baptist Churches in our area have been helping us.

I knew through my contact with CHASTE that another religious order had offered a house to be used to help women escape sex-trafficking. The Religious Sisters of Charity gave a house and the money to run it for 2 years.

In June 2005 another Sister and I were asked to represent the Catholic Bishops of England and Wales in Rome for the First Pontifical Conference on the Liberation of Sex-Trafficked Women. This gave us a wonderful opportunity to meet people from all over the world and to see how the Church was involved in this issue.

The aims of the Conference were:

1. To find out what was happening in each country with regards to trafficking.
2. To find out what the Church was doing about this.
3. To draw up a Pastoral Plan which would be sent to every bishop in the world, in the hope of a concerted effort to help these enslaved people.

We were particularly inspired by the Church in Italy and the way in which Religious Orders worked together to help trafficked people and to influence the Italian Government. Thanks to the work of the International Union of Major Superiors in Italy, victims of sex-trafficking are now given Residence Permits to remain in Italy and the Italian Government pays the revenue of 100 Safe Houses.

We knew that the Church in the UK is very different from that of Italy, but we felt that if Religious Congregations worked together here, we would be able to do what no congregation these days could do alone. On our return from Rome we wrote to many Congregations and invited them to come to a conference to look at practical ways of helping trafficked people in the UK. Our aim was to provide Safe Houses and the initial revenue to run them.

48 people came to our first conference and from this group we formed our Inter-Congregational Working Party which is made up of Sisters, Brothers and Priests from many different Religious Orders. We have recently re-named this group as: The Medaille Trust Vision and Action Group.

The Inter-Congregational Working Party led to the birth of the MEDAILLE TRUST - a Charity consisting of a number of Catholic Religious Orders. Our aim is to help women and children who have been sex-trafficked to the UK.

- The Inter-Congregational Vision and Action Group, formed 3 highly-focussed groups because there was so much to be done.

1. Hands-on .... To form a Company Limited by Guarantee.... Ensure that we open the Safe Houses, deal with the police etc.
2. An Awareness-Raising and Campaign Group, which meets at the Chigwell Justice and Peace Centre.
3. Fund-raising group ... Most of our funding has come from Religious Orders, Other Churches, Trusts, individual donations ...

- The John of God Brothers have a very special place in the Medaille Trust

- We recently formed a Schools' Group. This group is producing a pack which will be sent to all Catholic Secondary Schools....

The Vision of the Medaille Trust:
The Medaille Trust desires a world where the trafficking of human beings for sexual, economic and labour exploitation has been eradicated.
We have opened 2 Safe Houses in the past 18 months and have helped more than 36 women and their babies.

Each House offers:

• Safety
• Comfortable accommodation
• Therapy
• English tuition
• Opportunities to learn new skills
• Help with asylum claims
• Help to move on

A major break-through:
We have been working closely with a Women's Housing Association and as from the beginning of this year, we now have 5 Move-on apartments and by next January we will have 10. This is wonderful news because when some of the women have been with us for some months, they want more independence. Until now we haven't been able to offer it because they are not entitled to any funding. But this is only available for the women in the London House. There is no such facility for the women in our house in the South of England. This was the first house we opened and the women have been there a long time. They need more independence than we can offer them. We desperately need Move on for them. Not having Move on also means that we can't offer places to others who need what we are offering in our safe house.

We want to situate the unfolding story of The Medaille Trust within the context of:

• The counter-trafficking movement in the World-wide Church and also of
• The Universe Story

We are more and more aware that we are part of a worldwide movement within the Church for counter-trafficking. We have already mentioned that we went to the First Pontifical Conference on the Liberation of women in prostitution and trafficked women. Jo and I also attended the Five-Day Counter-Trafficking Seminar in Rome last October. It was called 'Building a Network: The Prophetic Role of Religious in the Fight Against Trafficking in Persons.' The emphasis throughout the Conference was on the Call of God to us to be prophetic in our stance against this slavery. The Seminar was sponsored by the Holy See and the US Government, with the aim of strengthening the networks which already exist in the Church amongst Religious Orders all over the world, in our fight against trafficking. This Conference led to the formation of The International Network of Religious against Trafficking in Persons. Women Religious from 26 countries took part in this Seminar, and we had reports from all of these countries. There were times when hearing about the suffering and the depths of degradation experienced by trafficked people was absolutely overwhelming, but at the same time there was a growing awareness of the work being done by small pockets of Religious all over the world. These small groups are now linking, to become networks.

In Rome, we had a sense of the uniqueness of the Medaille Trust. In other parts of the world it is mainly Women Religious who are involved in counter-trafficking work, but we, in The Medaille Trust, are men and women Religious working together. The Chair of the Trustees is a Montfort Priest and we have Brother Francis (Brother of Christian Instruction) and Brother John Martin who are also Trustees. The John of God Brothers run the project for us.

Towards the end of the Rome Seminar, Father Pascual Chavez, President of USG promised to do all in his power to encourage Men Religious to take up their role in counter-trafficking. Father Des, is communicating with him.

Another indication of being part of a world-wide counter-trafficking movement within the Church, is the Joint Declaration of the Union of Superiors General and Caritas Internationalis, of November 2007, where they declare their commitment to working together in counter-trafficking:

John Paul II, Benedict XVI, the Cardinal and Rowan Williams, are some examples of some of our Leaders within the Church speaking out against this modern slavery.

I would also like to situate the on-going story of The Medaille Trust within the emerging Story of the Universe. From this New Story of the Universe, we see that we, as a human species, are still in the early stages of our development. In terms of the length of time human beings have been on our planet compared with the age of the Universe, it is just a few seconds. We are young as a species, and we need a paradigm shift in our evolution; we need to mature. The fact that so many human beings are being bought and sold every year, and that there are about 1.8 million child sex-slaves in our world, shows the need for a radical change. Since the Industrial Revolution, our dominant paradigm has been one of USE. We look upon the Earth as inert material to be made into goods for our use. Our consumerism has gone so out of control and the large-scale buying and selling of people is one aspect of our wholesale destruction of our planet and its peoples.

Religious Congregations have always sprung up to lead the way to a new way of seeing and behaving. Our hope is that, together, we will help to change the dominant paradigm of our world, from USE to CARE, with care for the most vulnerable, being evidence of this change.

As we reflect on the suffering of so many of our sisters and brothers we do so against the background of Jesus' mission statement which was:

'... to proclaim liberty to captives and to let the oppressed go free...' I am also aware that this was the vision of many of our founders and foundresses. We simply follow in their footsteps and try to listen to the on-going call of God to us to SET MY PEOPLE FREE.