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Rome Counter-trafficking Seminar For six days in October, 26 women religious from 33 countries throughout the world met in Rome to take on together the problem of human trafficking. Catherine was one of those women and, in this case, was representing the Sisters of the United States as well as UNANIMA International. The seminar was the inspiration of Sister Eugenia Bonetti from the Counter-Trafficking Office of the Italian Union of Major Superiors and it was financed by the United States Embassy to the Vatican and the US State Department. Sister Eugenia had been a missionary to Kenya for many years and when she returned to Italy she was appalled to see so many Nigerian women in prostitution on the streets of Rome and even more appalled to learn that they had been trafficked to Italy, exploited cruelly by their traffickers, and sometimes even killed. As she investigated further she found that when they were picked up by the Italian police they were with returned to their traffickers or deported back to Nigeria where they were rejected by families. She resolved to do something to help these women. Help them she did by forming a network between Sisters in Nigeria and Sisters in Italy. When they learned a woman had been trafficked from Nigeria, they tried to find her in Italy to help her. When they learned a woman was being deported to Nigeria, they told the Sisters in Nigeria so she could be met, welcomed and helped to be reintegrated back into Nigerian society. Why did she set up this seminar? She has a vision of Sisters forming a worldwide network similar to the one between Nigeria and Italy�and she included all of the participants in this vision. So - what did we learn? We learned about the situation of trafficking in the countries where the Sisters worked: In Africa: Nigeria, Kenya, Ghana and South Africa; in Eastern Europe: Albania, Croatia, Ukraine, Poland, Slovenia, and Romania; in Western Europe: Spain, Netherlands, England, France, Belgium, Germany and Italy; in North America: Canada, USA and Mexico; South America: Colombia and Peru; and in the Asia-Pacific: Australia, Thailand, India, and Indonesia. What did we do? We learned tools to make a network work and decided to move ahead with forming a network called International Network of Religious against Trafficking in Persons(INRATIP). We wrote a public statement expressing our message about trafficking in persons. We chose an international steering committee to oversee the next steps of developing this network. Its members are Pauline Coll, sgs (Australia) Patricia Ebegbulem, ssl (Nigeria), Catherine Ferguson, snjm (USA), Imelda Poole, ibvm (Albania), and Elma van den Nouland (Netherlands). What will happen next? The steering committee will meet in January in the Netherlands to plan the next steps of building the network INRATIP. Meanwhile individuals in the network will keep in touch with each other to share good practices and to advise each other when help is needed.
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