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Sister Joellen Sbrissa of the Congregation of the Sisters of St. Joseph has spent most of her life working for systemic change on social issues, starting decades ago in the Cook County Jail as a women’s advocate.
From there, she did missionary work in Bolivia for three years, also working with women and families.
That’s why it made sense for the 71-year-old member of the Sisters of St. Joseph, a Roman Catholic women’s group, to head the organization’s Peace and Justice team and fight against human trafficking.
“People are not aware of it, but it’s really going on,” said Sbrissa, a La Grange Park resident. “It’s such a closed crime, people don’t know of it going on around them.”
That’s why a group of 11 orders of Catholic women’s religious groups, including Sbrissa at Sisters of St. Joseph in La Grange Park, are urging hotel chains in Indianapolis to curb human trafficking during events leading up to the Super Bowl on Feb. 5.
The U.S. Department of State estimates between 14,500 and 18,000 people — many of them women and children — are trafficked into the country each year. Trafficking is defined by The Federal Trafficking Victim Protection Act as recruiting, harboring, moving or obtaining a person by force, fraud or coercion for the purposes of involuntary servitude, debt bondage or sexual exploitation.
The National Human Trafficking Resource Center reported more than 11,800 calls were made to its hotline regarding sex trafficking in 2010, including calls from Illinois and Indiana.
In Illinois, there were 1,381 calls in 2010 to the National Human Trafficking Resource Center hotline. According to a report by the Cook County Commission on Women’s Issues, it’s easy for a Cook County resident to become a victim of trafficking without ever leaving the area, with more than 16,000 to 25,000 women and girls involved in the sex trade each year in metropolitan Chicago. A third of them become involved in prostitution by age 15.
Chicago is one of 13 locations designated with “high-intensity child prostitution” by the FBI.
“A lot of people think it’s young women from foreign countries,” said Sister Rosie Coughlin, with the Congregation of the Sisters of St. Joseph in Tipton, Ind. “Absolutely not.”
Large events, such as the Olympics, the Super Bowl and the World Cup, are hotbeds of human trafficking, according to the National Human Trafficking Resource Center.
“No one wants human trafficking in their town,” said Immaculate Heart of Mary Sister Ann Oestreich, who’s coordinating the Super Bowl 2012 Anti-Trafficking Initiative for the Coalition for Corporate Responsibility for Indiana and Michigan (CCRIM). “These activities happen in the dark. What we are attempting to do is to shine a light on sex trafficking and reduce opportunities for it to happen.”
Sister Joellen Sbrissa of the Congregation of the Sisters of St. Joseph has spent most of her life working for systemic change on social issues, starting decades ago in the Cook County Jail as a women’s advocate.
From there, she did missionary work in Bolivia for three years, also working with women and families.
That’s why it made sense for the 71-year-old member of the Sisters of St. Joseph, a Roman Catholic women’s group, to head the organization’s Peace and Justice team and fight against human trafficking.
“People are not aware of it, but it’s really going on,” said Sbrissa, a La Grange Park resident. “It’s such a closed crime, people don’t know of it going on around them.”
That’s why a group of 11 orders of Catholic women’s religious groups, including Sbrissa at Sisters of St. Joseph in La Grange Park, are urging hotel chains in Indianapolis to curb human trafficking during events leading up to the Super Bowl on Feb. 5.
The U.S. Department of State estimates between 14,500 and 18,000 people — many of them women and children — are trafficked into the country each year. Trafficking is defined by The Federal Trafficking Victim Protection Act as recruiting, harboring, moving or obtaining a person by force, fraud or coercion for the purposes of involuntary servitude, debt bondage or sexual exploitation.
The National Human Trafficking Resource Center reported more than 11,800 calls were made to its hotline regarding sex trafficking in 2010, including calls from Illinois and Indiana.
In Illinois, there were 1,381 calls in 2010 to the National Human Trafficking Resource Center hotline. According to a report by the Cook County Commission on Women’s Issues, it’s easy for a Cook County resident to become a victim of trafficking without ever leaving the area, with more than 16,000 to 25,000 women and girls involved in the sex trade each year in metropolitan Chicago. A third of them become involved in prostitution by age 15.
Chicago is one of 13 locations designated with “high-intensity child prostitution” by the FBI.
“A lot of people think it’s young women from foreign countries,” said Sister Rosie Coughlin, with the Congregation of the Sisters of St. Joseph in Tipton, Ind. “Absolutely not.”
Large events, such as the Olympics, the Super Bowl and the World Cup, are hotbeds of human trafficking, according to the National Human Trafficking Resource Center.
“No one wants human trafficking in their town,” said Immaculate Heart of Mary Sister Ann Oestreich, who’s coordinating the Super Bowl 2012 Anti-Trafficking Initiative for the Coalition for Corporate Responsibility for Indiana and Michigan (CCRIM). “These activities happen in the dark. What we are attempting to do is to shine a light on sex trafficking and reduce opportunities for it to happen.”
For Sbrissa, that’s meant contacting some of the managers of 220 hotels within a 50-mile radius of Indianapolis to ask four questions:
- Have employees received training to recognize potential occurrences of human trafficking in their hotels?
- Is there a protocol in place for hotel employees to document and report possible incidences of trafficking?
- Are hotel employees/managers aware of the local groups working to end trafficking?
- Is the hotel willing to make anti-trafficking information available to guests?
“We want to create awareness for the employees,” Sbrissa said. “We’re asking that the hotel train the staff and to be observant, reinforcing that this is not acceptable at this hotel.”
Ultimately, CCRIM hopes area hotels sign on to the Code of Conduct developed by the federal Ending Child Prostitution and Trafficking Act to prevent child sexual exploitation.
One major hotel, the Millennium Hotel in St. Louis, signed the code of conduct in July, meaning managers there would train employees on how to spot signs of potential child sex trafficking.
Millennium general manager Dominic Smart signed after the sisters shared information on human trafficking.
“He said, ‘I have a daughter; there’s no way I cannot sign this,’” Coughlin said.
Other hotels that she’s contacted in preparation for the Super Bowl, Coughlin said, have not signed the code of conduct. However, they have been cooperative in allowing brochures to be placed in their lobbies.
Sbrissa, who wrote 19 letters to various hotels in the Indianapolis area earlier this year, said her time working at the Cook County Jail started her desire for social justice. The former South Side Chicago resident and retired Nazareth Academy math teacher said social issues, which were always important to her, became much more real when she spent time with the victims of injustice.
“When I saw at the jail how women were treated, treated as they were worthless, I knew I had to do something about it,” she said.
That’s led her to advocate for a variety of social issues, she said, but human trafficking is one she believes needs a higher profile because it’s an issue she said many people are wholly unaware of, despite its widespread reach.
“It’s important to address this on the Super Bowl,” Sbrissa added.
Coughlin took it one step further.
“If we can save one young woman from being trafficked, it’ll all be worth it,” she said.
