Religious make efforts to bring awareness to World Cup trafficking

On June 12, 2014, the FIFA World Cup will start its soccer matches in several venues across Brazil. This tournament, which claims to be the most widely watched world sporting event -- using numbers as high as 1.3 billion -- again has everyone’s attention as 32 men’s teams compete for the 2014 World Cup title. As the tournament draws closer, so does a heightened concern among human rights workers, men and women religious and churches about the potential for human trafficking.  

“Both [of the last two] World Cups have given evidence of thousands of women especially brought into the [host] country,” Holy Cross Sr. Aline Steuer wrote in an email to Global Sisters Report from her home in Salvador, Bahi, on the northeastern coast of Brazil. “We fear this will occur here. There are cities in Brazil known for human trafficking due to the predominance of harsh conditions, male workers hired by the hundreds for labor -- a good recipe for trafficking.”