In Focus - Nuns against trafficking ( April 2026 )

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Mar 31
6 min read

In Focus

Title:

How Sisters on the Frontlines

Intro

Luke Coppen writes about the ‘quiet’ work done by thousands of nuns around the world, rescuing the vulnerable from trafficking.

Article

Sr Rose Paite describes¹ herself as ‘a simple nun’ and a ‘small one.’ But what she lacks in height and political power, she makes up for in boldness.

She is a familiar figure at Guwahati railway station, where trains arrive and depart at all hours as they crisscross north-eastern India. Dressed in a white veil, with a black handbag hanging from her elbow, she scans the platforms through her rimless glasses.

When she spots something suspicious – an unaccompanied child or young woman – she bounds up to them and asks questions. If she believes they might be victims of trafficking, she seeks to rescue them.

Paite is a member of Talitha Kum, a 6,000-strong² network of nuns that combats trafficking in 108 countries³ on every inhabited continent.

The nuns recognise that the forces they are up against are far larger and better resourced. According to the International Labour Organization, 50 million⁴ people worldwide are living in conditions of modern slavery. That’s more than the entire population of Spain – and their number is rising.

Modern slavery is a broad category that covers forced marriages (around 22 million people) and trafficking for forced labour (28 million), which includes commercial sexual exploitation. Almost 12 million of those in forced labour are women and girls.

The ILO estimates⁵ that forced labour in the private economy generates $236 billion in illegal profits annually. The beneficiaries of modern slavery include not only countless faceless criminals, but also wealthy and socially well-connected individuals – and even sovereign states.

While human trafficking is commonly understood to be the forced transfer of a person from one place to another for exploitation, that is not, in fact, the official definition. The US State Department’s 2025 Trafficking in Persons Report⁶ notes that ‘trafficking in persons is a crime of exploitation and coercion, and not movement.’ A person can be a victim of trafficking even if they remain in the neighbourhood where they were born – for example, if they were forced to perform unpaid domestic work at a local residence.

Trafficking is increasing in scope and complexity due to advances in technology. The 2025 TIP Report notes that emerging trends include the use of ‘AI-generated text-to-image technology, deepfake photo and video manipulation, voice and video generation,’ especially targeting women and girls.

Human trafficking is not a new phenomenon, and the courageous struggle against it is not new either. Josephine Bakhita was born in Sudan around 1869. Her carefree childhood was interrupted when slave traders seized her before her 10th birthday. It was her kidnappers who gave⁷ her the name Bakhita, which means ‘fortunate’ in Arabic. She was ‘bought’ and ‘sold’ multiple times, enduring abuse at the hands of some of her ‘owners’.

Ultimately, she was taken to Italy, where she was baptised and joined the Canossian Sisters. By sharing her testimony, including through the dictation of an autobiography, she inspired efforts to end slavery long after her death on 8 February 1947. Pope Francis declared in 2015 that 8 February would be commemorated annually as the World Day of Prayer and Awareness against Human Trafficking.

Nuns’ modern-day battle against trafficking arguably also has its roots in Africa. Sr Eugenia Bonetti, a member of the Consolata Missionary Sisters, spent 24 years serving in Kenya before she returned to her native Italy in the early 1990s. Back home, she was disturbed to discover that young African women had been trafficked to Turin’s red light district. She began a successful outreach to them.

In the year 2000, she was asked to move to Rome and establish⁸ an anti-trafficking office for the Union of Major Superiors of Italy. Bonetti helped to unify the efforts of more than 250 people from over 70 different congregations working in Italy into a single, powerful network.

Meanwhile, the International Union of Superiors General, also based in Rome, began to establish anti-trafficking networks in regions around the world. In 2009, the UISG launched Talitha Kum, the international organisation to which Sr Rose Paite belongs.

Many nuns engaged in the fight against trafficking describe it as a ‘call within a call,’ the phrase famously used by Mother Teresa to describe her discovery of a vocation to serve the poorest of the poor after entering religious life.

Some are called from unexpected places. Sr Rose Paite, the guardian of Guwahati railway station, was born⁹ into a Baptist family in India’s ethnic conflict-prone Manipur state. She was so moved by the service of Catholic nuns among her own Paite people that she decided to follow in their footsteps, entering the Missionary Sisters of Mary Help of Christians.

Wherever people are trafficked today, you are likely to find nuns fighting for their liberty. In Pattaya, Thailand, a city that has been described as a modern-day Sodom and Gomorrah, the Our Lady of the Good Shepherd Sisters oversee the Fountain of Life Women’s Center¹⁰. The centre helps young women freed from sexual exploitation to learn trades including hair dressing, jewellery design, and IT.

In Mindelo, a port city in Cape Verde, an island country near West Africa, three members of the Sisters Adorers established¹¹ Kreditá na bo, which means ‘Believe in you’ in the local Creole language. The programme helps vulnerable women who live in shacks made from shipping container metal on the city’s outskirts. Many are single mothers who are forced into the sex trade to provide for themselves and their children. The sisters help the women to learn to read, write, cook, sew, and use computers, offering them a path to freedom and financial independence.

Another member of the Sisters Adoratrices carries out similarly liberating work in London. Sr Ancy Mathew (also known as Sr Doly) was born in the southern Indian state of Kerala and served initially among street children in the eastern city of Kolkata. In the year 2000, she was transferred to England, where she came into contact with trafficked women. She founded the charity Rahab¹² – named after a prostitute mentioned in the biblical Book of Joshua – which offers pastoral care to victims of sexual exploitation.

The nun has accompanied police officers as they raid premises suspected of housing trafficked women. Her role is to speak to the women, who are more likely to confide in her than in the police, and help to arrange accommodation for those who need to move to safe houses.

Despite these effective initiatives, it is hard for nuns to keep pace with the evolution of human trafficking, which is developing at a supercharged rate due to the internet. In his message¹³ for this year’s World Day of Prayer and Awareness against Human Trafficking, Pope Leo XIV highlighted the rise of ‘cyber slavery,’ where ‘individuals are lured into fraudulent schemes and criminal activities, such as online fraud and drug smuggling.’ He described the phenomenon as ‘particularly disturbing,’ because it turns victims into perpetrators, ‘exacerbating their spiritual wounds.’

But even in the digital world, nuns are inspiring breakthroughs. In 2008, the Sisters of St Joseph Federation asked an organisation that helped them plan their annual national meeting to ensure the sisters would be staying at a hotel with a strong anti-trafficking policy.

Thanks to their interactions with the sisters, the organisation’s leaders realised they could identify hotels used to exploit women by examining the backgrounds of online advertisements. They founded¹⁴ a new company, the Exchange Initiative, that developed the TraffickCam app, with a grant from the Congregation of the Sisters of St Joseph. The app enables users to submit photos of rooms anonymously, helping to build a giant database of images, helping police to find victims and prosecute traffickers.

In 2024, Talitha Kum launched the Walking in Dignity app¹⁵, which allows users to convert their daily steps into tokens that can be donated to support anti-trafficking projects.

It is on this technological frontier that nuns will need to expand their fight against trafficking in the coming decades. To continue to be successful, they will have to be, as Jesus counselled his disciples, as shrewd as serpents and as innocent as doves’ (Matthew 10:16).

Perhaps they will work with experts who will use AI and data analytics to map trafficking hotspots and predict increases due to factors such as rising unemployment. Or maybe they will offer virtual support to victims who live far from any religious community. Technology will also help the nuns to extend and refine their current networks, ensuring that sisters are present wherever they are most needed.

Given that the number of women religious worldwide is declining¹⁶, they will likely seek to mentor young lay Catholics who want to join the anti-trafficking struggle. While nuns have led the battle, every baptised Catholic arguably has a responsibility to do whatever they can to combat the scourge.

For some, that will mean praying daily for those on the front line. For others, it will entail donating to a charity. For a small number, it could require laying down their lives for the love of their 50 million friends currently living in slavery.

Author Profile

Luke Coppen is the senior correspondent of The Pillar (pillarcatholic.com).