There’s a large slot in heaven kept ready by God, and it is for one particular army of religious sisters. Where others preach good, these sisters of the Talitha Kum have been doing a world of good by posing as prostitutes to infiltrate brothels and save victims of trafficking. They even buy children who are sold into slavery to rehabilitate them.
John Studzinski, an investment banker and philanthropist who chairs Talitha Kum, said that the network of 1,100 sisters currently operates in about 80 countries but the demand for efforts to combat trafficking and slavery was rising globally. So now the group is planning to expand to 140 countries.
The group, set up in 2004, estimates one per cent of the world’s population is trafficked in some form, which translates into some 73 million people. Of those, 70 per cent are women and half are aged 16 or younger.
“I’m not trying to be sensational but I’m trying to underscore the fact that this is a world that has lost innocence … where dark forces are active,” said Studzinski, a vice chairman of the U.S. investment bank The Blackstone Group, in an interview with Ellen Wulfhorst of Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of Thomson Reuters.
These religious sisters working to combat trafficking would go to all lengths to rescue women, often dressing up as prostitutes and going out on the street to integrate themselves into brothels. “They work in brothels and no one knows they are there”, according to Studzinksi.
“These sisters do not trust anyone. They do not trust governments, they do not trust corporations, and they don’t trust the local police. In some cases they cannot trust male clergy,” he said, adding that the low-key group preferred to focus on their rescue work rather than promotion.
The sisters’ sense of mistrust is not misplaced either because frankly trafficking is such a widespread problem and in many cases, it even continues because somebody looks the other way while these poor slaves are trafficked in and out of countries. And their conditions, especially the sex slaves is nothing short of horrible.
Studzinski agrees while recounting some of the horror cases he’s known of. He told of one woman enslaved as a prostitute who was locked up for a week without food, forced to eat own her faeces, when she failed to have sex with a target of 12 clients a day.
In another extreme case, one woman was forced to have sex with a group of 10 men at the same time.
The sisters were also proactive on trying to save children being sold into slavery by their parents, setting up a network of homes in Africa as well as in the Philippines, Brazil and India to shelter such children. The sisters of Talitha Kum raised money to purchase these children.
“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,” he said.
This network of religious sisters also target slavery in the supply chain, with sisters shedding their habits and working alongside locals for as little as two cents an hour to uncover abuses.
Talitha Kum, which translated from Aramaic means arise child, is now being hired by companies to see what is going on with respect to the supply chain and expanding globally would help address this issue.
“You can’t generalise about trafficking and slavery as no two countries are the same,” Studzinski said.
Image Courtesy: Reuters
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