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How This Catholic Church Helps Sex Trafficking Victims
"They need a safe place to be made human again"

Dan Kitwood / Staff / Getty Images
ByPaul Bois

Sex trafficking in the United States has ballooned into a terrifying reality. As noted by Catholic News Agency, some 300,000 minors will fall into the wicked trade each year in the U.S. alone.

"In Louisiana, state estimates indicate that about 40 percent of juvenile victims are being trafficked by their primary care giver: a mother, father, foster parent, uncle, a mother’s boyfriend," reports CNA.

One Catholic Church in Zachary, La., will not sit idly by as youths become corrupted, having pledged to make a difference. Working in concert with four Hospitaler sisters, Father Jeff Bayhi of St. John the Baptist Catholic Church opened the Metanoia Home, a Baton Rouge-area shelter for sixteen women under age 21.

“They’re not there as social workers or therapists,” but as mother figures, Fr Bayhi said. “They’re going to be there, and be a safe place for these children to be. To be loved, to be nurtured, to be made felt special again in the sight of God.”

Sex trafficking is especially problematic in Louisiana due to the high number of tourists – a staggering 15 million – who visit the state each year.

"The interstate highway that passes through Southern Louisiana runs across the country from Florida to California," reports CNA. "The Louisiana Department of Children and Family Services reported that more than 350 trafficking victims were found in 2015, and nearly 450 in 2016. Half of the victims were children."

Children are the most vulnerable to sex trafficking, as they typically come from broken homes with no positive adult figure. One case involved a 17-year-old senior at a predominantly white high school in suburbia who helped traffic 13-year-old freshman girls.

According to Father Bayhi, the traffickers work like demons in their luring of young women. First, it begins as a playful flirtation before it morphs into insidious seduction. Young girls (and boys) experiencing this face incredible dehumanization. Part of Metanoia House's mission is to instill the humanity back into them.

“They need a safe place to be made human again,” said Fr. Bayhi. “When you’re 15 years old, and you’ve performed 3,000 sexual favors, you’re no longer a person, you’re nothing more than a receptacle in your own eyes.”

“Our response is the religious sisters who are there,” he said. “These nuns are the heroes. How do you pay people in eight hour shifts to convince a 15-year-old who has been abused that they really love them? You can’t do it. That’s why the nuns are just so incredibly important to this.”

“We need to get them stable, we need to get them to believe in themselves. We need to reconnect these children with God."

The Metanoia House is open to all women, regardless of religious affiliation. No one-size-fits-all in facilitating recovery. A 17-year-old trafficked for three months will require different treatment than a 14-year-old girl trafficked for four years.

“We will want the children to finally have someone in their life that we trust,” said the priest.

Father Bayhi attributes the rise in human trafficking to Western civilization's devaluing of human life with the funding of Planned Parenthood and the pushing of pornography.

“One of the things I think you have to understand: human trafficking is not a problem. Human trafficking is a symptom,” he said. “We live in a society where we determine who has the right to be born. We live in a society where we get to decide who dies and when, with our elderly. And now there’s some recent things about Planned Parenthood, we’re talking about selling baby parts and making $52,000/week on baby parts.”

“For God’s sake, we have so devalued the dignity of human life that by and large as a society we see human life as a matter of profit, pleasure or possession,” he concluded. “Human life has become a commodity. Human trafficking is one more aspect of that.”