Some things seem never to get better!

Listening to the news over the last few weeks I have heard fears expressed that when the Olympics are held in London that along with all the sporting and tourist activity will come an increase in demand for women to satisfy the sexual appetites of the thousands of people coming to London for the Games, and these women will probably be trafficked here - fears based on expected demand for prostitutes at the World Cup in Germany this year. I also heard of a Chinese ring which was busted as it trafficked children into the UK, training them as pick pockets and then using the money to fund a massive drugs ring. Then what about the drowned cockle fishers who were trafficked in last year as cheap workers – which came up again in the news. In addition, there is all the chaos in the Home Office with the employee processing the papers who is alleged to have offered to speed up an immigrant woman’s application if she had sex with him; in a secretly filmed interview I saw, the woman indicated that she had struggled to get to her current state of financial independence by offering sex to pay for favours in more than one country. Visitors to a Mediterranean holiday resort were warned to keep away from some beaches because boat loads of illegal workers were being ferried across to it; many people drowned on the journey and their rotting corpses spoilt the tranquility of the holiday coast line! I expect in a few weeks when the British fruit ripens, many more illegal workers will be smuggled in to the country to help pick the fruit at wages no British worker would accept.

In the early 1990s I went to a conference in the Netherlands on Trafficking, where people from many European countries met with government ministers to demand that this trade in human beings be stopped. Women from former USSR countries spoke movingly of trying to find jobs in their impoverished home lands to pay for the basic survival of their families and of being recruited by anonymous business people to work in the sex trade abroad ; workers spoke of transit countries where papers could be forged with incredible skill and they listed countries where it was easy to get into. A sex shop in Nottingham was publicized as a destination for trafficked women. The GFS at the time urged everyone walking through London to look up at the top windows of the tall elegant terraces, because up there were servants who were virtually enslaved with no access to any human rights, let alone their passport.

All this was going on a decade ago and public understanding of the problem is greater now yet we still have to make a concerted effort to stamp out what is an inhuman and unjust trade in needy and innocent people. What can the churches to ensure that every person has their dignity respected? What should we be doing about the apparently insatiable sexual appetite that demands sexual gratification round the edges of the Olympics or the World Cup, or about the reverting to Dickensian habits of training children to be pick pockets? How in a ‘live for today and don’t worry how we get what we want’ sort of world does the church make a case for justice, peace and respect? And can Synod help?

Christine McMullen