Terrify No More by Gary A. Haugen

Terrify No More by Gary A. Haugen and Gregg Hunter Hardback: 240 pages Publisher: Thomas Nelson First Released: 2005 International Justice Mission website Buy from Amazon

Source: Bought from Half.com

Book Description (from the publisher's website):
In a small village outside of Phnom Pehn, little children as young as five years old were forced to live as sex slaves. Day after day their hope was slipping away.

Tireless workers from International Justice Mission (IJM) infiltrated the ring of brothels and gathered evidence to free the children. Headed up by former war-crimes investigator Gary Haugen, IJM faced impossible odds-police corruption, death threats, and mission-thwarting tip-offs. But they used their expert legal finesse and high-tech investigative techniques to save the lives of 37 young girls and secured the arrest and conviction of several perpetrators. Terrify No More focuses on this dramatic rescue story, and uses flashbacks to tell those of many other victims who were given a second chance at life.


Review:
Terrify No More is a gripping, well-written nonfiction book about a number of rescues the International Justice Mission has done. The main focus of the book is their attempt to rescue 40 children under the age of 14 from forced prostitution in a village near Phnom Pehn in Cambodia.

While the book is clearly about International Justice Mission's work, I felt like the main focus was raising people's awareness about modern slavery and injustice. It covered much of the same information as Sex Trafficking: Inside the Business of Modern Slavery, but it describes less graphic violence and is less technical.

The book describes IJM rescues of forced prostitutes, bonded slaves, and illegally imprisoned people worldwide. It details how the IJM team finds out about cases, gathers evidence, works with the local police to stage a raid, helps to prosecute the perpetrators, and finds aftercare facilities (and what they're like) for the victims. It also describes how victims can end up in these situations and what can be done to stop it.

The International Justice Mission is a Christian organization and the author does talk about how his faith influenced his decisions, but he does not assume the reader is Christian. I think Christians and non-Christians alike will enjoy this book.

I found the book a very inspiring page-turner that made me really appreciate the freedoms we tend to take for granted. If you like thrillers or are interested in undercover detective work or in humanitarian work, you'll probably enjoy reading this book. Overall, I'd highly recommend it.


If you've read this book, what do you think about it? I'd be honored if you wrote your own opinion of the book in the comments.


Excerpt from Chapter Thirty-Seven
The lead lawyer in these police training programs and other casework in Latin America has been our brilliant colleague from Puerto Rico, Jamie Farrant. He directs extensive IJM casework in Peru, Honduras, Mexico, and Bolivia in partnership with indigenous human rights organizations. Recently, case referrals have forced Jaime to also enter the ugly world of sex trafficking that exploits young girls trying to see a better life for their families. While conducting investigations with Robert Earle along the Mexico-Guatemala border, Jaime had to join Robert in playing the part of a sexual predator, and as he shared with me back at HQ about the experience, the agony for Jamie of drawing near to such pain was palpable. It ran very rough over Jamie's huge and compassionate heart.

"Each night becomes more difficult...once again brothel hopping, once again to look for girls, once again to pretend I enjoy doing this, once again a pedophile," Jamie explained. "Once again, we go out until 3:00 A.M. What a disgusting life...."

"One week of doing this is just too long, but what about the victims? What do we do about those girls who cry daily while they put on their masks? How much harder for them when they're only teenagers? How much harder when they recall that they were deceived into coming to this crowded but lonely and heartless place?"

It's the struggle we all experience at IJM when we encounter the world of the victim....

"One of the hard parts of posing as a pedophile," Robert Earle said, "is actually asking the questions of the pimps, using language you don't normally use, talking about things you just don't talk about.

"I need to get the pimp on tape telling me what the girls will do, what sex acts they can perform, and I have to be explicit with him. Of course, that's very unnatural, but it has to appear natural in order to get the evidence we need."

I know from my experience in Svay Pak that those pictures don't quickly fade from one's memory. It is nauseatingly uncomfortable to play the role. But such are the sacrifices my colleagues make--hearts that cannot remain unbroken, minds that now store images that can't be easily erased. And they continue to place themselves voluntarily in these situations where the thick, heavy darkness is palpable. They do it because they know their temporary presence in that underworld may be the only hope innocent victims have of seeing the light of freedom and experiencing the joy of rescue.


Read chapter one.

Inside the Business of Modern Slavery by Siddharth Kara

Sex Trafficking: Inside the Business of Modern Slavery by Siddharth Kara Hardback: 298 pages Publisher: Columbia University Press First Released: 2009

Source: review copy from publisher

Back Cover Description:
Every year, millions of women and children are abducted, deceived, seduced, or sold into forced prostitution, made to service hundreds if not thousands of men before being discarded. Generating huge profits for their exploiters, sex slaves form the backbone of one of the world's most profitable illicit enterprises, for unlike narcotics, which must be grown, harvested, refined, and packaged, the female body requires no such "processing" and can be repeatedly consumed.

In this first-of-its-kind journey, Siddharth Kara investigates the mechanics of the global sex trafficking business across four continents and takes stock of its devastating human toll. Since first encountering the horrors of sexual slavery in a Bosnian refugee camp in 1995, Kara has taken multiple research trips to India, Nepal, Burma, Thailand, Vietnam, the United Kingdom, Italy, the Netherlands, Albania, Moldova, Mexico, and the United States. He has met hundreds of slaves, has witnessed the sale of numerous human beings into slavery, and has confronted some of the criminals who have exploited them.

Drawing on his background in finance and economics, Kara provides a rare business analysis of sex trafficking, focusing on the local drivers and global macroeconomic trends that gave rise to the industry after the fall of the Berlin Wall. He quantifies the size, growth, and profitability of sex trafficking and other forms of modern slavery—metrics that have never been published before—and locates the sectors that would be hardest hit by specifically designed interventions and penalties.

Kara supplements his analysis with a riveting account of this unconscionable industry, sharing the moving stories of victims and revealing the shocking conditions of their exploitation. He concludes with a proposal for aggressive measures that target the essential business and economic functioning of the sex trafficking industry designed to provide a more effective global approach to abolishing these crimes against the world's most vulnerable and exploited persons.

The author will donate a portion of the proceeds from this book to the organization Free the Slaves.


Review:
Sex Trafficking is a thought-provoking and heart-touching looking into modern slavery. While the author mainly focused on forced prostitution, he also covered other types of forced labor and slavery. He included many stories of slaves and ex-slaves to give a face to slavery and to demonstrate the variety of ways women are enslaved. The author also gave detailed economic breakdowns of the profitability of forced labor and explained how these economics can be changed to make slavery economically less desirable.

Much of the book was written in an engaging, conversational style. The parts on economics did get a bit technical and dry, but his points were still very understandable.

I don't agree with everything the author said since his view of the world is different than mine. However, the reader can easily use the information he's gathered in this book to come to their own conclusions on how to fight modern slavery. The author does suggest several practical things an individual can do to help.

This book gave insight into modern slavery. It also provided a look into how very different other cultures can be in how they treat women, view slavery, etc. I'd highly recommend this book to anyone desiring a stop to modern slavery, people interested in other cultures, and to all women (especially feminists).


If you've read this book, what do you think about it? I'd be honored if you wrote your own opinion of the book in the comments.


Excerpt: Chapter One
Gaunt and distressed, [Maya] was nineteen when I interviewed her, after almost four years as a sex slave in each of Mumbai’s two main red-light districts, Kamathipura and Falkland Road. She was born in the Sindhupalchok region of Nepal, one of the poorest stretches of land on the planet, with an annual per capita income of $180, or fifty cents per day. Desperate to make ends meet, her parents sold her to a local agent for $55 on the promise that she would have a good job at a carpet factory, from which she could send home up to $10 per month. The night Maya left home, the agent resold her to a dalal (trafficker), who took her to Butwal, a border town with India, where they spent the night with another girl. The next day, Maya, the other girl, and the dalal crossed the border into India by foot. A few days later, they were in Mumbai.

This is what Maya told me happened next:

“Once I came to Mumbai, the dalal sold me to a malik [brothel boss] in Kamathipura. The malik told me I owed him thirty-five thousand rupees [$780], and I must have sex with any man who chooses me until this debt is repaid. I refused, and his men raped me and did not feed me. When I agreed to do sex, they gave me medicines because I had a urine infection. I was in that bungalow two years and made sex to twenty men each day. There were hundreds of girls in this bungalow, many from Nepal. One time I tried to escape. I complained to the police, but they did nothing. A few days later the malik’s men found me on the streets and took me back to the brothel. The malik put chili paste on a broomstick and pushed it inside me. Then he broke my ribs with his fist. The gharwali [house manager, madam] tended my wounds for a short time, and after this time I went with clients again, even though my ribs pained very badly. The gharwali gave me opium to make the pain less. After two years, the malik sold me to another malik on Falkland Road. During this time I lived in a pinjara [cage] with one other woman. It was very small and it was on the street, so it was very noisy at night. I was pregnant two times, and the gharwali gave me pills to kill the baby. The second time I became very ill. When I was strong I ran away. I went to a shelter near Falkland Road. They told me I have HIV. They helped me contact my father, but he told me not to come home. He said I can never be married and because I have HIV, I can only bring shame.”

Maya’s story is emblematic of the hundreds of thousands of women and children trafficked and forced into prostitution each year. As with each victim in this book, I have not used Maya’s real name, and in a few instances in which discussing precise geographic locations might result in danger to the individual, I have provided an alternate setting. Like most sex trafficking victims, Maya and her family were vulnerable to deceit due to economic desperation. Once Maya arrived at the brothel, she was swiftly broken down through physical and psychological torture. While her journey to Mumbai was direct, other victims endure multiple stops in several countries, where they are exploited, resold, and tortured. At each destination, victims are told they must work off the “debt” of trafficking them by having sex with up to twenty men per day. The accounting of these debts is invariably exploitative, involving deductions for food, clothing, rent, alcohol, and exorbitant interest rates. The false promise of attaining freedom is a powerful tool that brothel owners utilize to control their victims. As time passes, some slaves accept their fates, and in a Stockholm Syndrome–like transformation, they might be “freed” to serve as working prostitutes who mentor new slaves upon arrival. In Maya’s case, when her brothel owner decided she had worked off her debt, she was resold and given a new debt. If she had not escaped, the cycle of slavery might never have ended.


Read the Preface and part of Chapter One of Sex Trafficking.