Over 200 school girls abducted together Nigeria. Theirs are the haunting faces of modern female slavery. I’ve asked, “Can we end sex-trafficking, sex slavery?” I had my first answer from a man from the NYS Division of Criminal Justice Services: Not unless the demand by men ends, and that will not happen.

GSR Today - This week Global Sisters Report featured a story about Maryknoll Sister Helene O’Sullivan’s work with women in Cambodia who have been trafficked, empowering them through education. We may think that it doesn’t happen where we live.

The Irish government is finalizing the parameters of a judicial inquiry into church-run state-funded mother and baby homes. The inquiry comes amid increased disquiet about some of the reporting of the original story of St. Mary's Home in Tuam, run by the Bon Secours congregation of nuns.

GSR Today - Kate Kelly claims that Mormon women should have more input in church governance through ordination. Historically, that church teaches women have opportunities for leadership and service in other ways and the priesthood is exclusively for men to hold. It sounds familiar.

More than 52,000 minors traveling alone and 39,000 families have been picked up this fiscal year by U.S. agents at the Mexican border. The number of children traveling alone has doubled over a year ago and is more than seven times the number that was typical annually through 2011. For the past two months, volunteers acting on their own have been meeting immigrants at the bus station, providing food and helping the disoriented families navigate bus travel. As the numbers escalated, Catholic Charities of the Rio Grande Valley opened two assistance centers.

" . . . I baptize you with water for repentance, but he who is coming after me is mightier than I . . . ."

GSR Today - As we in the Global North search for ways to expand our consciousness of ourselves as part of a global religious life, we need to continue to commit ourselves to finding new and effective ways to assist our sisters worldwide to become the “New women of the old faith” in their countries as our foremothers did in ours.

Katy Donchik, 17, not only travels around the world to volunteer, but was also student body president, a varsity softball player and star of her high school musical. Oh, and she wants to help people AND animals when she grows up.

In the past 20 years, what has become all the more clear is that there is a critical need for the prophetic voice of all people in the church and the world – a need to which women religious have responded decisively. The call for women religious and for the community of faith to be a corporate prophetic voice to address injustice throughout the world is clarion.

From A Nun's Life podcasts - Sr. Margaret Nacke, CSJ, and Sr. Ann Oestreich, IHM, talk about human trafficking, the role of poverty in the traffficking of women and men worldwide, and efforts being made to end trafficking.