Heather Bellamy spoke with Carly Jones, the national manager for Mission Without Borders, about the European Commission's anti-trafficking report.

Carly: A lot of the time it's economic situations, especially where children and young people are trafficked. Sometimes what happens is, the trafficker will sell to the family a better life for the child and they think that the child is going to go abroad to get a better education, or something like that. So they agreed to it happening, because they are being misled and deceived.

Antoneta studying speech therapy

People being marginalised is also a factor. The Roma community are highly vulnerable to trafficking. They are heavily stigmatised in the communities where we work, so they often get overlooked for support. Nobody really notices if their children are not going to school, or if the adult female in the house isn't there anymore. People don't pay much attention to that and it makes them very vulnerable.

Heather: What is the work that Mission Without Borders do, in terms of why you would be responding to this report?

Carly: The reason why we are responding to it, is because some of the key areas that were identified were around the fact that a strong family unit and household is a really key element to preventing trafficking. Also the work that we're doing supporting families to become self-sufficient and give them that economic stability means that they are less vulnerable to trafficking.

When somebody has been trafficked, it's much more difficult to set them on the path to recovery. We would prefer to tackle that issue at its source and stop it from happening in the first place.
So by arming our families with the resources and the support that they need, they are not even vulnerable to trafficking to start with.

Heather: What resources and support are you talking about?

Romanian family

Carly: We take the whole family on a journey. We start with looking at the immediate issues the family are facing and a lot of that is about providing essential services. We have to give them immediate access to material support. That might be food, or materials to improve their housing.
It goes much deeper than that though. We take our family on a spiritual journey too and we hope that by enriching them with the Gospel that we are able to help them in that way too. That's quite often a long journey.

We also provide assistance in terms of scholarships and vocational training for children. We support them all the way through their school life, providing school supplies and making sure they can actually get to school and that they stay in school. We help them with homework clubs, out of school activities and various other things.

There is a whole package of assistance and we think that by providing a holistic package that everyone in the household is stronger and more resilient when it comes to trafficking.

Heather: How many families, or people, are you helping currently?

Carly: It's around 5,000 across all six countries that we work in.

Single mother in Moldova

We have a family sponsorship programme, where our UK supporters are each directly helping a specific family. They pay £18 a month to sponsor a family. Our UK supporters are helping about 150 individual families.

Heather: Is that figure of 5,000, 5,000 families or people.

Carly: Families.