MUMBAI, India - Poor rural women and girls around the world have been victimized by human traffickers, who target their communities due to their poverty and lack of social services.
A seminar to discuss tackling this problem was co-sponsored by the Vatican’s mission to the United Nations in New York on March 13 in New York.
“Rural women and girls are especially vulnerable to being ensnared by traffickers because they regularly lack access to adequate schooling and health, and are often marginalized, stigmatized and isolated due to poverty, unemployment and the lack of rural infrastructure,” said Archbishop Bernardito Auza, the Vatican representative to the United Nations.
“Rural girls and women are especially vulnerable to the lies of traffickers who promise them good work, good food, and education in the big cities. Rural girls are also vulnerable simply to running away to the cities believing that that is a way to improve their lives; such girls, however, often find themselves floundering in the unknown environment and very easy prey to traffickers,” he said.
Auza highlighted in a special way the work being done by “heroic religious sisters” in rural areas all over the world “who, far from the limelight, are going to the existential peripheries to care for the wounds that often don’t come adequately to the attention of the rest of the world.”
Franciscan Missionaries of Mary Sister Annie Jesus Mary Louis works in rural tribal areas of India, whose people are especially vulnerable to exploitation.
Since 2010, she has been running projects aimed at preventing, rescuing, and accompanying people at risk of trafficking, and has been able to rescue more than 100 women and girls from various cities and help them back into their home communities.
“Sexual exploitation is big business. It is governed by exactly the same principles as any commercial activity: Supply and demand,” she told the meeting.
The nun works in a rural area in the central state of Chattisgarh, and said the people she serves are very poor, with little education, sanitation, or health care.
“Traffickers know all of this. They know that the parents of children in my area are easily deceived, and sometimes so desperate that they willingly sell their own children,” she said during her presentation.
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