Loose the Chains
Modern slavery begins on a doorstep in Albania and ends on a street in Britain — and why credible, Albanian-led work against it deserves the backing of our Baptist family
A justice reflection for the Baptist family and friends of the Joint Public Issues Team · By Daniel Dupree, Qendra Tek Ura
“Is not this the fast that I choose: to loose the chains of injustice … to set the oppressed free and break every yoke?”
ISAIAH 58:6The case in brief
This reflection argues one simple thing: the fight against modern slavery is not a distant cause but a bridge that runs straight through our own family — and one end of it is in Albania. For much of the last decade, Albania has been among the highest source countries for people trafficked into the United Kingdom. The chain that ends in a car wash, a nail bar or a cannabis house on a British street very often begins in a village in northern Albania, in poverty, in a child out of school, in a young woman with no lawful way to earn. Traffickers do not create those conditions. They harvest them.
If that is true, then justice here is not only about rescue at the end of the chain. It is about the soil at the beginning of it. The evidence is now strikingly clear that the most durable protection against trafficking — and against a survivor being trafficked a second time — is not a border and not a shelter alone, but a community in which a person can stay in school, earn an honest living, and be seen. That is unglamorous, patient, local work. It is also, on the best current evidence, the work that actually holds. And it is exactly the work that a small, credible, Albanian-led charity called Tek Ura has been doing for ten years.
Two things now converge. The UK government has opened a new fund to invest in precisely this kind of community-based prevention and reintegration in Albania, running to 2029. And a generation in our own churches is longing to do justice that is real. This is a moment for the Baptist family — and our partners across the Joint Public Issues Team — to get behind credible local work at the root of an injustice that reaches our own streets. Not as saviours. As family, standing alongside.
1. A chain that reaches our streets
We are used to thinking of modern slavery as something that happens elsewhere. It does not. The Home Office’s own referrals have, for years, placed Albanian nationals among the largest groups of potential victims identified in the UK. Some are women coerced into the sex trade; increasingly, many are young men and boys moved into forced criminality — county-lines drug work, cannabis cultivation, the debt that is never quite paid off. When we walk past the too-cheap car wash or the high-street nail bar, we may be walking past the far end of that chain.
Here honesty asks something of us. In recent years Albanians arriving in Britain have too often been reduced to a headline — “small boats,” a political football, a number to be deterred. It is worth saying plainly, as our own churches said of the asylum debate, that a person made in the image of God is never a statistic. Some who arrive are chancers; some are genuine refugees; and a real number are victims of trafficking — the categories are distinct and must not be collapsed into one another, in either direction. But every one of them bears a worth that no policy and no smuggler can cancel. The gospel does not let us look at a frightened nineteen-year-old and see only a problem to be managed.
God consistently shows a bias to those in poverty and those who are excluded. To see the person behind the headline is not sentimentality; it is the beginning of justice.
And there is a deeper connection the church, of all bodies, should be able to see. The Albanian young people most vulnerable to the trafficker are frequently the same young people our national conversation has learned to fear. If we want fewer people exploited on British streets, the most effective — and most just — place to act is not only at the point of arrival, but at the point of origin: in the Albanian communities where the recruiting happens. To love our neighbour here turns out to require loving our neighbour there.
2. The shape of the injustice
It is worth being clear-eyed about the evidence, because justice built on sentiment does not last. Albania is overwhelmingly a source country — networks, often built on family or clan ties, recruiting from the poorest rural areas and from marginalised Roma and Balkan-Egyptian communities. The numbers formally identified are modest and almost certainly undercount the reality: the government and NGOs identified 178 potential victims in 2024, up from 165 the year before.
But the shape beneath the number is changing, and it should trouble us. The old picture — the sexual exploitation of women and girls — now sits alongside a sharp rise in labour exploitation and the forced criminality of children, with boys forming the majority of identified child cases: coerced into begging, petty crime and drug work. These are children. The risk factors are grimly ordinary — poverty, a child pushed out of school and into earning, disability and the isolation around it, exclusion, family breakdown. Not exotic vulnerabilities requiring specialist detection, but everyday deprivations that a rooted community organisation meets daily: at the school gate, in the drop-in, in the physiotherapy clinic.
And there is a second injustice, quieter than the first: the reintegration gap. Albania’s specialist shelters offer real, professional care, but survivors returning home too often find the same poverty, the same absence of work, and the same community that failed to protect them the first time. The Council of Europe’s expert monitors noted in 2025 that only two trafficking victims have been awarded court compensation since 2008. A survivor returned to nothing is a survivor at acute risk of being trafficked again. The chain, uncut at its root, simply re-forms.
3. Justice that looses chains — not only rescue, but restoration
Isaiah’s great question — is not this the fast I choose, to loose the chains of injustice? — is often read as a call to rescue. It is that. But loosing a chain is not only cutting it in the moment of crisis; it is dismantling the conditions that forged it, and restoring the person it bound. Luke’s Jesus stands in the synagogue and reads it as his own mandate: good news to the poor … freedom for the captives (Luke 4:18). Micah reduces the whole of it to three verbs: act justly, love mercy, walk humbly (Micah 6:8). None of these is satisfied by a dramatic intervention that leaves the ground unchanged.
This is where the evidence and the theology say the same thing. The reintegration literature is blunt: economic reintegration is protection. Access to a sustainable, lawful livelihood, a real pathway into work, a child kept in school — these are among the most effective defences against trafficking and re-trafficking there are. Which means that, in practice, “loosing the chains of injustice” in Albania looks remarkably like: a job, a school place, a trade, a community that notices. It looks like reclaiming lost worth — the very phrase our churches use to describe what the search for justice involves.
To loose the chains of injustice, in a trafficking source community, looks less like a raid and more like a livelihood. Prevention is not the soft edge of justice. On the evidence, it is close to its core.
This reframes the whole question of what “anti-trafficking work” is. It is not only the specialist, the shelter and the prosecutor — vital as those are. It is also the patient community labour of keeping a family out of the desperation that traffickers exploit, and of giving a returning survivor a life worth staying for. That work is quieter, slower, and harder to photograph. It is also exactly the work the church has always been good at, and exactly the work that is most under-resourced.
4. Tek Ura: credible justice, already at work
This is not a theoretical proposal. For ten years, Qendra Tek Ura — “at the bridge” — has done precisely this work from two community centres, in Tirana and in Spitallë, Durrës, the latter a marginalised, largely Roma and Balkan-Egyptian settlement of exactly the kind the trafficking evidence flags as high-risk. It serves several hundred people a week, and it is honest about what it is: not a shelter, and not a rescue agency, but a community development organisation whose ordinary work happens to address the ordinary drivers of trafficking.
Three of its programmes are, in substance, justice work at the root. Its Recovery programme moves people out of extreme poverty into lawful employment — dozens into legal jobs each year, alongside more than a thousand social-work drop-ins, roofs repaired, winter heater loans, careers groups for young adults, and university fees for women in vulnerable situations — in partnership with the state employment service. Its Skills programme keeps at-risk children in education and draws women at risk of trafficking into vocational training. Its Connect programme builds cohesion and inclusion in the very Roma and Balkan-Egyptian communities from which recruiters prey, because isolation is a trafficker’s working environment and belonging is its removal.
Two things make it more credible still, and both matter to a justice-minded church. First, it is Albanian-led and strikingly female-led: Albanian women lead the team, the finances, the rehabilitation and skills work, the social work and the church in Durrës. This is not Westerners doing justice for Albania; it is Albanians — many of them young women — being raised up to shape their own nation, with the stated aim of a fully Albanian-led executive. Second, it is honest about its limits. It does not claim to identify victims or to have solved the problem; it works upstream and alongside the specialists and the state, and it names the gaps it is still growing into. Credible justice work is the kind that tells you the truth about itself.
This is not a project the UK could do for Albania. It is something God is doing through Albanians — many of them women being handed the microphone for the first time — which we are simply privileged to serve.
5. A moment to act — a fund, and a family
Two doors have opened at once. In 2026 the UK government, through the British Embassy in Tirana, opened a new Modern Slavery Fund Albania Programme running to March 2029, investing significant new multi-year funding in exactly this: community-based prevention, sustainable reintegration, and strengthening Albania’s own institutions and civil society against trafficking. It is a public, structural investment in the root of an injustice that reaches our shores — the kind of thing our churches have long argued the powerful should do. A call for proposals is open, and credible local partners are now being sought to help deliver it.
And the second door is our own. Through its UK sister charity, At the Bridge, its UK church-planting partner Vale Community Church, and a Council of Supporters of around thirty UK churches, Tek Ura already spans both ends of the bridge. The relationships, the trust and the track record exist. What a justice-seeking Baptist family can add is the thing that turns a credible local charity into a lasting one: prayer, partnership, funding, advocacy, and people. This is a moment where our giving and our voice can back work that is already proven, already local, and already at the exact point where the evidence says justice is won or lost.
Answering the objection: is this really ours to carry?
A fair question sits under all this, and it deserves a fair hearing before an answer. Is anti-trafficking not the job of governments, police and specialist agencies — and should our limited giving not begin at home? It is well-meant, and it carries real weight: our resources are finite, the specialists do exist, and there is genuine need on our own streets. But it does not finally hold, and we should set it gently aside.
First, it misreads where the gap actually is. Governments and specialists concentrate, rightly, on identification, shelter and prosecution. The reintegration and prevention gap — the community soil where chains are forged and survivors are lost — is precisely the part the system under-resources and the part the church is best placed to hold. We are not duplicating the specialists; we are filling the space they cannot reach.
Second, “at home” and “abroad” are the same chain. The trafficking that ends on a British street begins in an Albanian village. To act at the root is to serve our own communities too; the bridge runs both ways. And third, the whole tenor of Scripture resists the instinct to draw the circle of neighbour-love tightly. The Samaritan did not ask whether the wounded man was local. Justice, in the prophets and in Jesus, is stubbornly indifferent to the border between “ours” and “theirs.”
To love the vulnerable at home rightly is not to ignore the vulnerable abroad on their behalf. It is to take up the whole chain, at the end where it can most be broken.
6. A word to those who long for justice
If you are one of the many in our churches — young and old — who ache to do justice that is real, and not only to lament injustice from a distance: here is something real. Not a slogan, but a bridge; not a saviour project, but a chance to stand alongside Albanian Christians and community workers who are already doing the work, and to strengthen their hands. You do not have to solve modern slavery to help break one chain, keep one child in school, or help one woman into work she chose rather than work that was forced on her.
Proverbs asks us to speak up for those who cannot speak (Proverbs 31:8), and Amos longs for justice to roll down like waters (Amos 5:24). Those are not only calls to protest — though they are that. They are calls to build, patiently, the conditions in which the vulnerable are no longer prey. That is slow water. But it wears down mountains.
7. What we are asking of the Baptist family
If this reading is right, then churches, associations and friends of JPIT — together — can do a handful of concrete things:
- Pray, informedly. Hold Albania, its trafficked and its returning, and the Albanian team of Tek Ura before God — and let that prayer reshape how we speak about Albanians in our own national debate.
- Give to the root. Back credible, Albanian-led prevention and reintegration work financially — the livelihoods, education and community that the evidence shows are the most durable protection against trafficking.
- Partner as churches. Join the Council of Supporters or link your church to Tek Ura through At the Bridge, so support is relational and lasting, not a one-off transaction.
- Speak with a Christian voice. Refuse the dehumanising script about Albanian migrants; insist, publicly and locally, on the image of God in every person behind the headline, and on the difference between a trafficking victim and a statistic.
- Learn before we lead. Come to Albania to learn from a resilient, Albanian-led, largely female-led church and community before presuming to teach — and carry that fire home into our own justice-seeking.
- Send the willing. Through the At the Bridge internships, resource young adults who long to do justice to go, be formed, and be released — to empower, never to replace.
Modern slavery is one of the great injustices of our age, and for once its root is genuinely within our reach — a short flight away, in a country where credible, humble, Albanian-led work is already breaking chains. The powerful are, for now, investing at that root. The question for us is whether the family that prays your kingdom come, on earth as in heaven will stand alongside them.
Break down barriers. Build people up. Bring people together.
The best is yet to come.
A note on sources. Trafficking data and the shift toward labour and child criminal exploitation: US Department of State, 2025 Trafficking in Persons Report: Albania (Washington, DC, 2025). Compensation and victim-identification findings: Council of Europe (GRETA), Fourth evaluation report on Albania (Strasbourg, 18 June 2025). Economic reintegration as protection against re-trafficking: UNICEF Albania, Economic reintegration of trafficking survivors in Albania (Tirana, 2022); K. Ramaj, “The aftermath of human trafficking”, Journal of Human Trafficking (2021); ILO reintegration guidelines (Geneva, 2020). The fund: British Embassy Tirana / FCDO, Modern Slavery Fund Albania Programme 2026 to 2029: call for proposals (2026), grants running to 31 March 2029. The theology of justice drawn on here reflects the shared principles of the Joint Public Issues Team (Baptist Union of Great Britain, Methodist Church, United Reformed Church; Church of Scotland as associate partner). Scripture quotations are the author’s renderings of Isaiah 58:6; Luke 4:18; Micah 6:8; Proverbs 31:8; Amos 5:24.
Daniel Dupree is Executive Director of Qendra Tek Ura (Tek Ura), an Albanian NGO and church-planting organisation working in Tirana and Durrës since 2016. He serves as Co-Leader of Vale Community Church, Bedfordshire, and writes on mission, community development and justice. dan@tekura.org
