Throughout the world, criminals exploit poor or desperate people. Traffickers offer them jobs that don’t exist and take them from their homes before selling them into unpaid prostitution, beggary, or forced labour.
By Laura Sheahen This is Part 1 of a two-part article on human trafficking. To find out more about how COATNET helps former victims, see Part 2. “When we started in the early 2000s, a common way for traffickers to lure people was through ads in the newspapers,” says Gabriela Chiroiu of Caritas Bucharest. “They’d offer attractive ...
Food security, especially that of children, is a major problem in Haiti. Caritas has put in place various initiatives in the province of Les Cayes in southern Haiti to deal with this issue. With the help of CRS, the local Caritas has set up more than 200 mothers groups. What’s a mothers group? “As the ...
Campaigners are hoping that the plight of Sri Lankan death row housemaid Rizana Nafeek could end soon with her release from a Saudi Arabian prison and her return home. Rizana Nafeek was sentenced in 2007 to beheading for strangling a baby she was looking after as a nanny in 2005. Rizana was just a minor ...
By Fr. Francisco Gallardo, director of the Caritas migrant house at Matamoros, near Mexico’s border with the USA. People leave their homes in search of the “American dream” but they end up coming to us looking for lodging, clothes and help. Many of them arrive completely exhausted. There are people who’ve been kidnapped and who ...
In Tinzawaten there’s next to nothing to eat or drink, the houses are roofless shells, it’s freezing at night, scorching in the day, murder and rape go unpunished, women are sold as slaves and babies are born in the open. This is the desert of Mali. The people of Tinzawaten are migrants who’ve been deported ...
The Sister* from Caritas Sri Lanka searches for the women migrant workers who’ve returned home abused and traumatised, their dream of saving a nest egg for their families shattered. Chandrangani Gunathilaka’s story is one of the worst the Sister has heard. Chandrangani went to Kuwait as a maid in January 2010, paying agents over $200, ...
Across the globe, women do 66% of the world’s work and produce 50% of its food, yet earn only 10% its income and own 1% of its property. Such figures show just how far we still have to go in the struggle to achieve the genuine equality and empowerment of women worldwide, an objective set ...
Urban and domestic violence has become a more pressing problem in Uruguay. Caritas Uruguay decided to push forward peaceful conflict resolution programmes throughout the country.
Caritas Internationalis urged its 165 national members to unite to protect the rights of women migrants at the end of its special ‘Female face of Migration’ conference. Over 100 representatives from the Caritas confederation of Catholic charities and other migration experts from 50 countries attended the three-day conference in Saly, Senegal, 30 November to 2 ...