When I go to see P.S.I.’s health work in a slum, a brothel, a ruined public hospital or an overburdened, inadequately supplied rural health clinic, I long to connect with individuals. I seek out the personal, the private. I am always humbled and awed at the trust these magnificent strangers have in me, their utter willingness to share their most intimate stories and pain with me. As I listen, I hear the truth of woundedness. I listen to life stories in which the blood of history does not dry. And I know this organic process of being heard helps them. I know my keen listening helps me. Today my ardent hope and prayer is that my bringing you into this sacred circle of sharing helps you help them.

Your help should be manifested, as you in your own words say, as prevention, protection and prosecution, and the three “Ps” must become the norm in national legislations and policies worldwide. They can only be achieved with a balanced, holistic approach: a willing and thorough collaboration between governments, institutions, foundations, non-governmental organizations, faith-based organizations and, very importantly, grassroots organizations, which have such intimacy and effectiveness in the field. Political will must accelerate. Funding for proven programs must increase. And “normal” citizens must be sensitized to care and to act.

What does this help — prevention, protection, and prosecution — look like on the ground, in Kigali or Laos or Managua? It is nothing short of the legal, economic, educational and social equality of girls and women. Gender equality must absolutely be made a driving priority at all levels, for it is the contaminated root of human trafficking and all social ills will be vastly ameliorated with gender equality. If we were not sexually objectified, the demand side of trafficking would reduce, and there would be no money to it. Had we education and employment, we would not, out of lethal innocence, be tricked and lured by pimps and traffickers. Were we not relentlessly, desperately poor, a poverty so often exacerbated by disease for which we have neither prevention nor treatment, such as malaria, TB, diarrheal disease, HIV and STIs, we would not succumb to transactional, cross-generational sex, or full-blown sex work, out of the primal urge to stay alive and feed our babies. If we could choose when we marry, who we marry, and regulate our fertility, space our birth, we could break the subversive cycle of staying punished and trapped for our merely being women. If we earned a fair wage for fair work, work we went to school to do, we would not be labor slaves. If we had land rights, we wouldn’t be turned out of our homes and left to starve when our husbands die. And if courts and societies gave a damn, our traffickers would be deterred by effective laws and sentencing.

I know a little girl in Cambodia. Her family, very poor, sold her to a nice enough seeming stranger who said he’d give the girl work in Phnom Penh and send the destitute parents home a share regularly. When the parents accidentally discovered their child was actually being sold for sex, and that her new “uncle” was earning a lot more than he had said he would be, they sued him for a higher share of their baby girl’s earnings.

I know an HIV-positive man in Svay Pak. I sat with him while he burrowed his crazily scarred face in my lap and wept. He is a sex slave, and he got those scars when his first rapist raped him while having a dog maul his face.