by Nadia Ramoutar  MMM Communications Coordinator                         Ireland                22.02.2025

Many years ago before I began my work as a Communications Coordinator for the Medical Missionaries of Mary, I met a young American woman who worked for ten years in India’s red light district helping women get out of prostitution.  Then she moved back to the United States and began an organisation called Rethreaded where she taught sex workers how to make clothing and accessories giving them necessary job experience to keep them off the streets.  I remember walking up to the door and her opening it.  She had an apron on a sweeping brush in her hand.  She was sweeping up dead cockroaches.

“The problem with prostitution,’ she said. “Is that it is largely economic.  Women don’t have the money so they get into it to survive and then they don’t have the money to get out of it.”

This year we see that estimated figures for human trafficking of sex workers is expected to increase by 25% and for children it is expected to increase by 30%.  Despite the efforts of devoted people, it’s getting worse.

Child trafficking,  and other forms of trafficking are rising as poverty, conflict and climate leave more people vulnerable to exploitation, according to the 2024 Global Report on Trafficking in Persons published in January by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC).

There is a perversity to this that I cannot comprehend but it is a shocking trend that I know we all need to hear.  How cruel that people suffering already in poverty will become enslaved in a system that uses people and their bodies for profit.  The idea that because a child is poor then they can be sold or taken is appalling but it is not new.  The concept of a human being as a commodity to be traded is one that many countries built empires on and many companies made their fortunes upon not just then, but now.  How can we put a price on a human life?

It is important that we really take off our rose-coloured glasses and look closes at how human trafficking really works.  If we don’t, we will continue to fall rapidly behind in protecting vulnerable people especially children.  Our MMM Sisters are actively working to fight this trend and are doing so in some of the poorest communities in the world.  Because human traffickers know that this is where they will thrive.

It seems that in a world which can design faster smart phones and use Ai to write books on anything, we are failing as a species in solving this age old problem of trading in souls.  Why is it so hard not just to prevent human trafficking but to stop it from thriving and growing so massively in profit?

I wish I had the answer and I am so proud of the MMM Sisters who continue to fight like David against Goliath.  We cannot give up in the face of such startling facts.