Episode Transcript
[00:00:02] Speaker A: Welcome to the Love Justice Podcast where.
[00:00:04] Speaker B: We hear from different voices who are.
[00:00:06] Speaker A: Joining us in the fight against modern day slavery. Here's your host, Hannah Munn.
[00:00:14] Speaker C: Welcome to the Love Justice Podcast where we share the ideas behind Love Justice's impactful work through conversations about fighting the world's greatest injustices.
I'm your host, Hannah Munn. In today's episode we are digging into the idea of Wear a light can create a big impact, how small strategic interventions can disrupt systems of exploitation and protect the vulnerable in a powerful, cost effective way.
Joining us in this conversation is Jesse Rudy, Founder and CEO of Redeem International and John Molineau, Founder and CEO of Love Justice International.
Jesse brings a wealth of experience in global justice work. Before founding Redeem International, he served for 12 years with IJM International Justice Mission, leading teams in Sri Lanka, IJM and the Philippines and serving as a part of IJM's global leadership. Today, through Redeem, Jesse and his team are fighting for widows and orphans in Uganda where one in three widows face the threat of land theft by partnering with local authorities to stop abuse and restore what's been taken.
What's especially encouraging about this conversation is how it impact the power of deterrence in a fight against injustice, why preventing victimization is what matters most, and how shifting the perception of risk can drive real change. We also talk about this bold idea of blowing it up, reframing how we think about impact and Jesse shares a really powerful story of what happened when he actually blew it all up and the ripple effect that followed. You'll also hear about the power of peer to peer encouragement, how light touches of collaboration, encouragement and mutual challenge among leaders in this space is leading to great impact.
Whether you are in this work, support it, or simply exploring what it means to fight injustice with strategy and hope, I think that you will be deeply encouraged by this conversation. So without further ado, let's get into it. Jesse, welcome to the Love Justice Podcast. Before we dive into today's conversation, I'd really love for our listeners to get to know you a bit. Can you share a little bit more about your background and what brought you into love? The work of measuring and fighting injustice?
[00:02:37] Speaker A: Sure. But first I just want to say thanks for having me on the podcast. I really appreciate it, really respect the work that you guys are doing at Love Justice. Got to know John over the last couple years and you guys are just doing really great work and so it's fun to be here.
So yeah, my background is that.
[00:02:57] Speaker B: At.
[00:02:57] Speaker A: The start of my career I worked in Washington D.C.
doing mostly labor and employment litigation and some government contracts work.
But early in my career, I met a guy by the name of Gary Haugen, who is the founder of an organization called International Justice Mission.
And Gary kind of laid out his vision for this thing that didn't even exist at the time that I was talking to him.
A vision of protecting the poor from violent abuse and exploitation around the world.
And I didn't think I wanted to be a part of that professionally. I thought my role in all of that was that I was going to be an attorney, I was going to make buckets of money and I was going to give a lot of it to IJM so that they could help people be protected.
Because I love the vision, but I was just like, I don't have any desire to do that.
But over kind of four or five years of being an attorney, I actually found it hard to give money away.
And I didn't feel as though I was having the impact that I wanted to have.
And so after, yeah, about four or five years, position came open with IJM and I talked to my wife and we prayed about it and then threw my hat in the ring.
And I ended up spending 12 years at international Justice Mission leading teams in Sri Lanka, in Uganda, in the Philippines, and then ultimately serving on IJM's global leadership team.
And kind of the centerpiece of that time was my time in Uganda. I spent five years designing and leading a program that was designed to combat what IJM referred to as succession related property grabbing, which sounds like the most boring crime in the entire world.
When they told me that's what I was going to be doing, I was like, that doesn't sound like sex trafficking. That sounds really, really boring.
But when I got to Uganda, what I found was that if you're a woman and you lose your husband, your odds are one in three that violent men are going to push you out of your home so that they can steal the land that it sits on and to push you out of their home. They're going to do every horrible thing that one human being can do to another.
And yeah, I was hooked at that point. That's what I wanted to spend the rest of my life doing.
And ultimately that's that project. And that time at IJM is what led me to start Redeem.
[00:05:36] Speaker C: Yeah, thanks for sharing that, Jesse. And if I am reading your response right, there was a little bit of like a brokenheartedness that really hooked you for the long, the long term of being in this type of work, which we Talk about a lot and how important that is just in the work for injustice is having that brokenhearted anointing to be able to serve the poor.
I could even hear it just in the way that you changed the tone of how you were talking.
That that is a. Is a big part of your why.
So. Yeah, yeah, thanks for sharing that, John. Let's dig into specifically Love Justice's strategy, and we can also share in just a minute, Jesse, a little bit of Redeem's strategy as well, but Love Justice's strategy, transit monitoring attacks, human trafficking at the most strategic point while a person is being trafficked. John, you've said that it's the world's only tangible human trafficking prevention strategy. Can you take us back to the beginning of when you first started realizing that? What convinced you that intervening at this specific moment could disrupt trafficking systems and save lives?
[00:06:55] Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah. First of all, I just do want to say, Jesse, great to have you on the podcast. Thanks for taking the time. And just mention. Yeah, Jesse and I have got to know each other. Last couple years, we've been at a retreat for Christian leaders called the Refuge. And we just. We had one day a couple years ago, we were on these pontoon boats and we just connected around impact and around just the importance of impact. And, you know, I had always believed. And really, Jesse, you were. You were pretty instrumental in helping me see and think about the important ways that our work could have significant impact beyond the intercept, which is something I had always believed.
Yeah. But, you know, so in terms of the. The question you're asking, Hannah, you know, if you want to stop something, you have to actually stop it. It's. It's almost like. But it's almost like too obvious. You can state that, but much of the work that aims to fight human trafficking is actually trying to get people who have already been enslaved out of slavery and to care for them. And of course, that's tremendously valuable and important work. But it's also true that it would be far better, if possible, to prevent those terrible things from happening than to a person and trying to put back the pieces after the fact.
But most of the prevention strategies that are used to fight human trafficking are not tangible in the sense that it's awareness where you can't point to a particular person and say, here's a person who would have otherwise been enslaved or job creation.
And some research has suggested that those strategies may not actually reduce how much trafficking is going on.
In 2004, 2005, I had moved to Nepal, was learning about Human trafficking had my heart broken. Started learning about different. Different models that were. That were used to disrupt it. And there was this strategy at the time, it was called border monitoring. Several Nepali organizations along the Nepal India border had invented it and were doing it. And it. It really made a lot of sense to me as the. The. This tangible human trafficking prevention strategy that intervenes at the most strategic moment right when a person is in the process of being trafficked but before they have been enslaved. And so when. When we learned about that, we. We saw that seemed like the most effective way to disrupt human trafficking, and we've been doing it ever since.
[00:09:21] Speaker C: Yeah. And even what you said in the beginning, John, of just how you got connected with Jesse, how you guys really geeked out over impact, I would almost. And correct me if I. If it's fair to say this, I feel like after you met with Jesse, that led to kind of you being spurred onto, really thinking about this tipping point idea. Like, I think he was the one who really pushed you over the edge to start putting it to paper, encouraged you. And I think that's what's really fun about having people like Jesse on the podcast is because a lot of our guests have played instrumental roles in spurring us onto who we're becoming, I think, in a lot of ways. And I remember, you know, you wrote that paper and then we're sharing it, and then that's what led to kind of the tipping point vision that then give way to prevalence. And I can just see from a small light touch of Jesse the impact that he's having in Love justice in some really amazing ways.
So, Jesse, that's to encourage you to. And I think just as a bystander of that, it's been cool to see it kind of come full circle right now.
[00:10:33] Speaker B: His light touch has had a big impact within Love Justice.
[00:10:36] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Jesse can. Before transitioning to the next question, can we just pause and talk about the impact of Redeem? What does the impact look for you look like for you guys?
How do you measure that? Just give us a little bit of a glimpse there.
[00:10:52] Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely. So at Redeem, what we do is we work to protect the homes and land of widows and orphans.
So, like I said earlier, what we found in Uganda was that if you're a woman and you lose your husband, the odds are actually really, really high that violent criminals are going to drive you out of your home so that they can steal the land that it sits on.
And so what we want to do is we want to protect widows and orphans from being abused. Like, we want to prevent those abuses. I think John said it before, like the.
The thing that matters is actually how many people are being abused. It's not how much people are aware of it, it's not how mad people are about it, it's not how much people care about it, it's whether or not.
And so everything that we do should be focused on maximizing the number of abuses, the number of victimizations that are prevented. And so we built a model to prevent abuses through the deterrent power of law enforcement.
So essentially what we do to protect widows and orphans from land theft or property grabbing, as they call it in Uganda, what we do is we deploy teams of local justice professionals, Ugandan attorneys, social workers, investigators, community relations, security paralegals, to intervene directly in individual land theft cases, cases where women and children are being driven out of their homes.
And what we do is we partner with local law enforcement in those cases, restoring victims to their homes, prosecuting land thieves for their crimes, rehabilitating the surviving families to safety and strength, and then broadcasting those results as a warning to anybody who would even consider stealing land from a widow or an orphan.
And John made an interesting point earlier about kind of prevention versus response. People often see that model and they say, oh, you're being responsive. You're not actually preventing anything.
Why wouldn't it be nice if you could get upstream and just educate people or just raise awareness so that people wouldn't be abused, so you wouldn't have to prosecute?
Well, it turns out that that's not actually how the world works.
It turns out that prosecution is prevention.
And in fact, it might be the most important ingredient to prevention.
What I learned over my time at IJM and in my time at Redeem is that law enforcement leads to deterrence, deterrence leads to safety, and safety leads to prosperity.
So if you want vulnerable populations like widows and orphans in Uganda to prosper, they have to be safe.
And if they have, if you want them to be safe, those that would abuse them have to be deterred from doing so. And the greatest and most easy way and most effective way to deter those people from abusing them is to actually enforce the laws that were written to protect them.
And so that's what we do, is we intervene directly in those individual cases and we broadcast the results, essentially changing the risk reward calculation for those that are engaging in the abuse.
And what we see over time is that we not only help the clients that we restore to their land, but we actually prevent tens of thousands of other women and children from ever having to lose their homes in the first place.
And it turns out the only thing better than being restored to your land is actually just never losing it.
[00:14:23] Speaker C: So, Jesse, this is all teeing up really well for this next question, and that is that you and John kind of collaborated on this idea where a light touch has a big impact.
Can you walk us through that core idea or argument? Why do you believe that a light touch has a big impact and what are the key elements of that light touch and the impact that it has?
[00:14:47] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. John and I had this conversation on a first on a pontoon boat, and it was really, really great. I think it was eye opening for both of us.
And I think that the core of it is. The core of the idea is that the deterrent impact of law enforcement and is an incredibly powerful and incredibly efficient way to protect the vulnerable from violent abuse and exploitation.
When I was at ijm, we worked on dozens of projects around the world protecting people from violent crime. And one of the things that I learned as I looked at those cases and those. Those projects was that there really are two types of crime in the world.
There are crimes of what I would call passion and perversion, where kind of the underlying motivation is a lack of self or some carnal desire, right? And then on the other hand, there are crimes of what I would call economically motivated crimes where the ultimate motivation of the criminal is, is some sort of profit margin.
So on the one hand, you got crimes of passion and perversion, things like child sexual assault, domestic violence, you know, where people lose control and they commit a crime. On the other hand, you have crimes that are very, very methodical crimes like trafficking or land grabbing, where the motivation of the criminal is to actually gain a profit.
And what I found was that while combating crimes of passion and perversion is actually really complicated and really nuanced and actually very, very difficult, combating economically motivated crimes is surprisingly simple.
It really all comes down to the risk reward calculation for the person who's committing the crime.
Not the victim, but the person who actually is committing the crime.
In places where the crimes that are things like human trafficking or land grabbing are against the law, but those laws are not being enforced, there is a high possibility for profit for those who steal or those who exploit, and there's almost zero risk of accountability.
And what I found when I looked at the criminals that commit these crimes, they're not monsters, right?
They do monstrous things, but they're not monsters. They're not monsters who are compelled to destroy the lives of women and children.
They're also not idiots. They don't real. They don't fail to realize that what they're doing is wrong or that it's a bad thing. They're opportunists who look at this landscape around them and see, I can make a lot of money if I do this, and there's exactly zero risk to me if I do it. And in that situation, they choose to do it over and over and over again. And so you see high abuse rates in those environments, but the idea is that stopping them isn't actually all that complicated. It's just math. You just have to switch that risk reward calculation so that the risks become greater than the rewards.
And the greatest way to do that is by enforcing the law.
So take what Redeem does. Every time we restore a victim to their home, what we're doing is we're communicating to the community that stealing land isn't actually as profitable as you thought it was. Or take what love justice does. Every time you all intercept somebody at the border, that trafficker no longer makes a profit.
[00:18:10] Speaker B: Right.
[00:18:11] Speaker A: And if all the other traffickers hear that that guy didn't make a profit, they perceive trafficking to be less profitable on the other side. Every time Redeem prosecutes a land grabber for their crime and then broadcast that the community, what we're communicating is. Yeah, it's also. It's not profitable. Also, it's very risky to you.
There are financial risks, There are personal risks, There are social risks that are going to be imposed on you if you engage in this crime. Similarly, when you guys intercept somebody at the border and then you engage local law enforcement, what you're doing is you're imposing a risk on those traffickers.
And so over time, if you can do enough of those cases in a given geographic area, what you're doing is you're changing the risk reward calculation for everybody else who might consider engaging in that crime. And when the risks finally come to exceed the rewards, what we've seen over and over and over again is that abuse rates drop dramatically.
You might help a hundred people directly, but you might see tens of thousands of people who actually never have to be victimized by the crime in the first place. And it's just that light touch of law enforcement that creates a massively large impact on entire populations.
[00:19:23] Speaker C: Yeah. Yeah. And, John, you've shared very similar things, and in fact, you've already said it in this episode, that preventing that victimization is what matters the most, and that increasing the perception of that Risk, like what Jesse said, is uniquely powerful in doing. So. Can you, John, unpack this idea for us mainly, like, who influenced and where and how you came about that idea, like, that perception of risk, where did that come from? How did you learn about that? How did you become convinced of that, and then also share why you're hoping to rally other organizations and researchers around that idea?
[00:20:00] Speaker B: Yeah, and first of all, I'll just say, like, I very much agree with, with Jesse, that it's an economic. It's an economic decision for people. And. And it's a risk reward calculation.
And I mean, and it's about just disruption. You know, like when. Basically when you have a situation when a crime is being committed without any disruption, a small effort can have an outsized impact. Whether that's like a single security camera placed, you know, strategically placed, can deter shoplifting, or a police car parked along a highway can dramatically reduce speeding. Or health inspections is another thing where you do they. They hardly do any health inspections, but a few health inspections significantly deter and they significantly increase compliance, even when they're not doing inspections. And so I think both transit monitoring and Jesse's land reclamation strategy, that they're like police cars, especially in those places where people are able to just do it freely without disruption. They're like police cars parked on these hitherto unpoliced highways that lead to slavery or to land theft for the most vulnerable people in the world.
And it makes a lot of sense to me, and it always has. Jesse, you really, when you started sharing your thoughts about this, it really kind of emboldened my thoughts about it. And now I think in your work and I think in ours, we're really starting to. To see and believe in the significant, especially in situations where things are happening without a disruption, something, a light touch can have a significant impact. So.
[00:21:36] Speaker C: And can you guys, like, one thing I'd love maybe for each of you to touch on is where.
What influences did you have in thinking about that, like, diminishing the risk and deterrence? Was this just something that you learned by doing the work and figuring it out along the way? Were there authors, were there researchers, were there other NGOs that helped cultivate this idea?
[00:22:04] Speaker B: Jesse, I'll let you go first because you probably have a lot more to say about this than I do, but maybe I should go first for that reason.
[00:22:11] Speaker A: Yeah, go ahead, John.
[00:22:13] Speaker B: I mean, to me, just thinking about it is the main thing. And then talking to Jesse and hearing from him and then kind of learning, learning about deterrence theory or Just, I don't even know if it's even called deterrence theory. Learning about just the studies of deterrence and just dipping my toe in the water and then this idea of the current, the course, there's diminishing, of course, when law enforcement responses become increasingly robust, there's going to be a diminishing return on each extra $10,000 you spend compared to the first $10,000 you spend. And so it all just kind of came together in a way that made a lot of sense for me.
[00:22:49] Speaker C: Jesse, this actually.
Yeah, Jesse, this probably touches a little bit on the question that I had for you. So maybe I'll ask that and then you can piece it all together in a way that is helpful.
But you guys do draw on that idea of the economic principle of the law of diminishing returns to explain how deterrence works.
So for listeners who might not have an experience or background in economics, can you explain how this concept helps us think more strategically about preventing exploitation? And then you can also share some of the influences over the years that have helped you come to that idea.
[00:23:32] Speaker A: Yeah, so I will say I definitely don't have a background in economics.
I did go to UVA for law school and had a number of professors who kind of were of the law and economics bent and kind of the idea of using the law to change, to change the incentives for people to prevent bad things from happening. So I think that's probably what got my mind started in that direction, where a lot of my professors in law school that were that focused on law and economic theory when they were. When they were teaching.
But I think the aha moment came for me when I was leading that program at, at IJM to combat property grabbing from widows and orphans in Uganda.
When I got there, we were really just trying to figure out how.
How could we help protect an individual woman, an individual child? How could we put them back in their home? And the original strategy when I got there was actually a mediate first strategy.
So basically, a woman would get driven out of her home by a violent criminal to steal two acres of land. And we would bring her, and we would bring him, and we would bring the local clan leaders and local religious leaders and political authorities together, and we'd all sit in a circle and we'd negotiate.
And usually what happened is we'd split the baby and we'd say, well, could you just give her one acre back?
And she would get an acre and then he would get an acre and we'd sign an agreement and then we'd Throw a party, and we'd eat ice cream.
And the truth is, her getting an acre back was actually a massive win for her as an individual. Having an acre of land versus being absolutely destitute is massive.
But at the same time, it was a loss for the entire community because what we were communicating was that it's actually okay for you to steal land.
You will profit from it. You won't profit as much as you'd like, but you'll profit from it. And not only is there no consequences, we're actually going to throw a party and we're going to get you ice cream when it's all over. Over.
We think it's that great.
And.
And I was actually flying home for the I James Global Prayer Gathering, and I had my Jerry Maguire moment, and I wrote a memo that was entitled I want to blow it all up.
And in the memo, I basically said, we're really good at restoring individual victims to their homes. And I think we're doing a disservice to all of these other widows and orphans in that we're incentivizing people to steal more land.
And I do not think that's appropriate.
And the great thing about the folks at Leadership at IGM is they looked at that and they were like, absolutely.
We know about the deterrent impact of law enforcement. We want to see it preventing crime.
Blow it all up.
And so we blew it all up, and we decided we're not going to mediate first, we're going to prosecute first.
And in every case, we are going to prosecute these men for the crimes that they've committed against these women. We're going to hold them accountable for what they've done. We're also going to try to restore her to her land, and we'll mediate about that. But the starting point is that she gets everything back.
We're going to mediate about damages, but she gets everything back, and you're going to have a penalty imposed upon you.
And what that team was able to do after we did that was they were able to put a thousand people back in their homes, and they were able to support local law enforcement in the prosecution of just shy of 100 land grabbers.
And over the lifetime of that project, you know, our goal in that was just actually to help those individuals. Right. But at the end of the project, we measured what were victimization rates among widows and orphans in the project area, and we saw that they had dropped by 80%.
And what that meant is there were tens of thousands of women and Children that we had never met. Like, we didn't know their names, we couldn't identify them individually, but there were literally tens of thousands of women and children that we didn't know that would have been destitute, but never had to experience that abuse.
And it was like we had uncovered the formula to Coke was like, there's no way. We cannot scale this thing, because we have found something that is so powerful at being able to protect the vulnerable from some of the worst things that one human being can do to another that we have an obligation to figure out how can we mass produce it.
And that, ultimately is how Redeem started.
I ended up sitting down with Gary, the founder and CEO of ijm, and we were in agreement that we've got to figure out a way to scale this.
And we decided that actually the best way to scale it was to spin it out into a separate, standalone organization that was focused exclusively on protecting widows and orphans from violence.
And so IGM actually gave us the seed money and gave us some initial tailwinds to help us get started so that we could mass produce medicine that would protect tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, and hopefully soon millions of women and children from losing their homes. Sorry, that was a really long, roundabout way of answering your question, but that was my aha moment.
[00:28:51] Speaker B: Right.
[00:28:52] Speaker A: Was seeing that intervening in these individual cases and that's really all we did, ultimately radically changed behavior and provided protection to tens of thousands and more.
[00:29:04] Speaker C: Yeah, I. That. That was. Even if it was roundabout, I feel like that was such a good. I mean, like, we were hanging. I was hanging on his every word.
[00:29:13] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:29:13] Speaker C: Such a cool.
[00:29:14] Speaker B: And I was not round about it.
[00:29:16] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:29:17] Speaker B: Impact information and.
Yeah. Just brain dump. It was amazing.
[00:29:23] Speaker C: Yeah. I had no idea that that's how Redeem started. And I love that idea of championing. Championing other NGOs and setting people free to do what they do best. And the. The phrase that you had in there, Jesse, I. I am expectant that that phrase is. Could be, like, prophetic for listeners of, like, blow it all up. Like, what is that phrase going to prompt in listeners that might need that little push to just blow it all up? Like, I love. I love that. I love that. And get excited thinking about the ripple effect, even of that word that you. That you shared.
John, much of the academic literature on deterrence comes from Western context with strong law enforcement, but LJI has worked extensively in areas with weaker systems. Why is that distinction important? And how does it reshape what's possible when it comes to disrupting exploitation and maybe what are the challenges that come with working in Uyghur justice systems?
[00:30:28] Speaker B: Yeah, there's a lot of minute. Jesse could probably speak to them better than me. But you know, in the United States we have, according to Walk Free's latest global slavery index, the fifth strongest government response to human trafficking and, or to slavery. And we have, we're 122nd in the prevalence of slavery. So you have high, highly effective. So you're on this, if you have this curve, you're on the upper part of this curve where it's, it's really hard to move the needle much. And that next $10,000 might not do that much.
And it's also rated as amongst the least vulnerable countries in the world. But the places that we tend to work that tend to have a higher prevalence of slavery and a very limited government response. So, and essentially like what Jesse said, people are able to just do something with impunity that's no risk for them. You know, people are able to move people into slavery with relatively little risk of disruption or being brought to justice. And it's not necessarily because the governments don't care about stopping slavery, at least to my understanding they do. It's, slavery is illegal in every country of the world but, but police efforts in an area will tend to naturally focus on the problems that are, that are most important to the local people, to that area. And human trafficking is in some ways kind of like the ultimate non local crime.
You know, it's at the recruitment phase, it's local, but then you don't see what actually happens to people as far it's indistinguishable from someone offering someone a good job far away.
And it's what happens when they get there, which no one that it's local to really sees. And most victims don't really want to tell their story because they're ashamed. And there can be, there can be societal stigmas that go with that.
And along the way somebody's traveling, it's just people passing through. You know, nobody along the way really knows where that person came from and what their story is. And they don't know the story of what's going to happen to them. And so it's, it would be, it's not, it's not unsurprising that it, that it's not a high law enforcement priority. But, and then in the places where the destinations that people are taken to, it's hidden, it's not visible, it's usually protected by a complex web of societal factors like corruption.
So for all these reasons, stopping human trafficking tends to be prioritized behind other crimes that have a greater local effect. And that creates conditions where, like Jesse said it was happening with land theft in Uganda, people are just able to get away with it without risk and without risk of disruption. And that creates the conditions where a little bit of disruption can have an outsized preventative impact.
[00:33:15] Speaker C: Yeah. And Jesse, your experience in Uganda highlights how small shifts in perceived risk can yield massive results, both in terms of lives impacted and cost effectiveness.
You also have mentioned before that you saw similar results in a number of projects while you were working at ijm. Can you share a little bit more about what that looked like, what they all had in common, and maybe with the thought of listeners who might be looking to invest in similar organizations or maybe thinking about how to do their work even better with some of the principles that we've talked about in this podcast?
[00:33:56] Speaker A: Yeah. So when I was getting ready to start Redeem, I tried to look at other examples of projects that were successful and projects that were unsuccessful. And I looked across ijam's portfolio, and I found that overwhelmingly the successful projects were those projects that were combating economically motivated crimes.
And in fact, IJAM had nine different projects at the time that they were combating either land grabbing, sex trafficking, or labor trafficking.
And they had actually measured the project's impact on victimization rates.
And in all nine of those projects, combating three different crime types in five different countries across three different continents, in all nine of those projects, you saw a victimization, the headline victimization rate drop by 70% or more in less than six years.
And I started to see a pattern. What you saw was that what IG was doing and what we're doing at Redeem is now. And what. What you all are doing at Love justice is you're entering into those spaces where the law is just absolutely not being enforced.
And the truth is, people live in reality.
As John said, trafficking is illegal in every country in the world. Turns out, stealing land is also illegal in pretty much every country in the world.
But people live in reality. And reality is not. The law is not what's on the books. The law is what people actually see happen.
And if so, if I'm a average guy in rural Uganda and my neighbors, my neighbor's husband dies, when I look back into my memory and I think of all the times that I saw a man steal land from a widow, I can't think of a single time that somebody was actually arrested for it.
And so reality, there is no law.
And in that space, yeah, I'm going to take that opportunity because it's highly profitable and there's no risk.
And what I found is that when you inject law enforcement, this is the light touch you were talking about. You inject just a small amount of law enforcement into that system, you have a massive impact.
That impact is somewhat slow.
What I found in examining the projects that I'd worked on and the others in that portfolio was that in the first year, you're really just helping your, your clients, you're engaging in individual cases and you're helping your clients and nothing's really shifting.
I would say in the, in the community's eyes, you're a curiosity, but you're not an indication that there's a new sheriff in town. Right.
But if you keep at it and you get to this, this tipping point, you engage in a critical mass of interventions.
By years two to five, you see a massive drop off in victimization rates as people are bailing out because it's now risky and it's not making as much money as they thought it would.
And what happens when you get to about year five or so is that it tends to reach a new normal.
It never goes to zero.
If anybody ever tells you that they're going to eliminate violent crime or eliminate trafficking completely, like they're lying to you, you they're going to get it to a new normal because there's always some perpetrators out there who either too stupid or too stubborn to give up on abusing the poor.
But once you get to that new normal, then the marginal return on doing more cases actually decreases because you don't need to do as many cases to maintain a perception as you do to change a perception. John used the example of the, of the camera, right, or the, or the health inspection. You actually don't have to do that many health inspections once people realize that health inspections do happen, because then it's just the threat of the health inspection and you only have to do a couple here and there and, and impose some consequences. And that causes compliance among us wide swath of a population.
And so the way that we look at it when we're investing is marginal return on investment.
We want to engage in as many cases as we can as quickly as we can so we can get to that spot where it drops off the table and gets to that new normal. Once it gets to the new normal, we want to equip local law enforcement to be able to do the minimal amount of work to be able to maintain that new normal, maintain continuing protection for that vulnerable population.
[00:38:31] Speaker C: You've seen the headlines, you've heard the stories.
Children are being trafficked every single day. And everything in you says this has to stop.
But rescuing kids after exploitation is never enough. If it were your child, would you sleep soundly knowing that they might be found after being taken? Or would you want to know that they were never taken at all? At Love justice, we've spent the past 20 years building a proven model to stop trafficking before it happens. Training local monitors and intercepting at key border points and reuniting kids with their families.
We can do this for $112 per person intercepted. But there are more borders, more children, more lives at risk than we can reach right now. That's where you come in. Join Project Beautiful, our monthly giving community, and stop trafficking before it starts. Visit projectbeautiful.org so Redeem is in its fifth year and I'm curious if you've seen a decrease in the number of cases that you've been taking on and if that has your team thinking about where can we start working next? Have you guys thought about or are in a place where you're thinking about scaling now that you've maybe reached that tipping point in Uganda, or are you still chasing the tipping point?
[00:39:49] Speaker A: So, yeah, our original plan in Uganda was that we wanted to deploy 10 intervention teams to strategic locations across the country.
Last month I was in Uganda doing the onboarding of teams number nine and ten.
And so we, we've reached that saturation point that we were hoping to achieve.
And in October, I will be in Zambia launching the pilot team in that country.
So we're looking to replicate our model there and trying to test the conditions of the legal system to make sure that the way that we operate will, in conjunction with the Zambian government.
[00:40:27] Speaker C: Wow, congratulations. I feel like that's a big milestone for you guys.
[00:40:30] Speaker A: Yeah, it's been a big year. We're really, really excited about where we're at right now.
[00:40:34] Speaker C: Thanks.
Well, John, we have been. We've spent the last 45 minutes talking about the concept of a light touch having a big impact. And for years it was largely based on theory and field observation and hearing about what other organizations were doing. But more recently, you've been able to see actual change in prevalence, results as it relates to human trafficking. Can you take us on that story a little bit for you that you've been on the last year?
[00:41:08] Speaker B: Yeah, well, as I, as I said, it was on a boat that Jesse and I kind of connected around this and did we see a bear?
[00:41:17] Speaker A: We did see a bear.
[00:41:18] Speaker B: We did see a bear. Okay. And we just ended up just connecting. And Jesse shared with me a lot of what he's sharing here. Really got the wheel spinning for me. But I remember like, I've, I've always believed that. Well, I would say as an organization we really value being skeptical about our own impact and we realize we need to. And we have a lot of people and Hannah, you've been one of these traditionally over the years who are very skeptical about our impact. We want to make sure that what we're saying is true and that we can stand on it. But I've nonetheless always believed that, that, that intercepting people and the arrests and prosecutions that accompany transit monitoring had a significant preventative impact. But I've never really had any, any way of really knowing much about that.
And Jesse, you told me a number. I don't even remember what the number was. You, you told me something like, I, based on what I, what you had seen, you said, I think that it's likely that for everyone that you intercept X number of people are actually prevented. And I was, I was actually very surprised by that number. And I was kind of like.
And that's when you and I kind of started collaborating on some of the ideas behind this. But for us, it's always been the gold standard to be able to actually show a reduction in the prevalence of a crime like human trafficking or slavery.
And Walk Free, the Walk Free foundation, through their Global Slavery Index, is the only organization in the world that does country level slavery prevalence reporting. And they've done multiple reports in 2013-2015-2016-2018 and 2023.
In their early reports, we were pretty skeptical about it.
And for a long time we were exploring a plan to measure prevalence ourselves and also to try to help validate their methodology. And it was a one year goal for us, but it was like we had to measure human trafficking prevalence, do try to monitor for four years or two years and then measure it again and see what the results is, what the results would be. So it was, it was always kind of like this holy grail that was forever far away.
But this November, I was reading about Walk Free and I learned that their methodology had really evolved and improved and that ILO had recently signed on to it.
And just before boarding a plane on a Friday, I was like, I just need to check what has happened to the prevalence of slavery in. And I just thought the top five countries of our impact, Nepal, India, Malawi, Kenya and Uganda. And so I just, I just check. You have to actually get into the walkthrough reports and look at their rank and, and I was floored by what I, what I found in every, every.
All five of those countries saw the prevalence of slavery decline. And so I, I go through the weekend on Monday, I'm like about to, to write an email to everyone at Love justice announcing these amazing results. And then I was, I just thought I should just check the six and I checked Bangladesh and it too declined. And you know, I won't give you, I'll just say by the time I'm checking 11, 12, 13, I'm weeping, you know, by what I'm seeing. And in the end what I found is that every single one of the 16 countries that love justice is working in has seen the prevalence of slavery decline by an average of 9% per year over the course of our work.
And from 2013 to 2023, that's the walk Free's first to their latest measure, the rest of the world has increased by 11 and a half percent.
And so Jesse was one of the people that I was when I found this and I was excited to share with this. And so we got on a call.
[00:45:01] Speaker A: It was one of the best days. I had this, I don't remember what exactly it was, but I was having a bad day and you sent me that email and I was like, oh my goodness, this is amazing.
[00:45:11] Speaker B: I don't even remember what you said, but you probably said something like I told you, you were right. It, but yeah, that was, it's, it's been an amazing journey and, and ultimately like I, I believed in it. I believed in, in this idea of the preventative power of deterrence or disruption or, and, but I just, I had, I had not, I, I, it was what I found to be true, frankly, blew me away.
[00:45:41] Speaker C: So, yeah. And that, that's a little tantalizing preview of what we hope to be its own episode.
Unpacking the prevalence findings. And I think like, one thing I'm kind of taking away from this conversation is we've talked a lot about where light touch has a huge impact. Deterrence theory, risk and all of those things from a strategy standpoint. But I think the underlying current that is obvious to me is the light touch of encouragement and how that actually has a really big impact and calling out the greatnesses in other people and giving them the confidence to keep going. And Jesse, I think you wore that for John in a lot of ways. And just talking about the episode that we recorded last week with Peter Greer and how to champion other organizations. And I forget what his book was called. John, do you remember off the top of your head the, like, rooting for rivals. Yes, rooting for rivals. And how.
Just that idea. Idea of, like, how that can be just as impactful in these spheres to calling everyone out in their own pockets into even greater greatness. Jesse, thank you for doing that for us. And I hope you're encouraged by where it's led and how you've seen the evolution of that, too.
[00:47:02] Speaker A: I'm massively encouraged. And I love the stuff that you guys are doing.
You all succeeding. There's nothing I want more than to see you all succeed.
I love what we do, and I think it's the most important thing in the world, otherwise I wouldn't be doing it. But that doesn't actually diminish what everybody else in the kingdom is doing. Like, we are a body, and the eye cannot say to the ear, I don't need you.
Like, we all need each other to be working, and we all need each other to succeed.
And so it's just glorious to see the results that you guys are finding.
[00:47:35] Speaker C: Yeah. Thanks, Jesse. This next question will be for both of you, and I'll have John start and then Jesse follow.
As we bring this conversation to a close, what is the invitation that you would like to extend to those listening?
[00:47:54] Speaker B: I think I'd say the.
Something I have say a lot, which is that the legacy of our lives is the impact that we have in the lives of others.
For most of us, that impact will be in the lives of other people who are just around us, our family, our friends.
And that's hugely important, you know, and. And can. That can leave a tremendous legacy.
And I think that should be a. The. The. Jesus said, you know, love your neighbor as yourself. There's a proximity element to that. And clearly loving our. Our family is. Is a part of what we're each called to. And.
But Jesus said, whatever you do for the least of these, you do for me. And he didn't say that about anyone else, just specifically the least of these. The neediest people around. And. And what I just want to say is, like, live your life in such a way as to help them as much as possible.
And this is one where I'll say, if you're not doing that, blow it all up.
I love Jesse. You're afraid like this, this is. Should take it as a blow it all up to do that. Because the poorest, neediest people, like victims of human Trafficking or orphans and. And widows on the. On the verge of having their land, their primary source of food, shelter, income, savings and social standing, insecurity taken away from them by violence or any of the other neediest people of the world. Those are the people that when we help them, we're. We're helping Jesus. So do all you can to help them as much as you can. And I'm convinced that the best way to do that is find something where a light touch can have a big impact and look for organizations that do that really well.
There aren't many organizations there. There are not many organizations that I would say this about, but. But one of them is the organization that Jesse leads. And you can read about them and Jesse's work and more about it on redeeminternational.org and consider making a donation.
Or if you can find a better way to make an even greater impact than by supporting Redeem or Love justice, then do that because. And please, if you do, let us know about it, because we're like you. We just want to make the greatest impact we can with the resources we've been entrusted with.
[00:50:02] Speaker A: With.
[00:50:04] Speaker C: Yeah. And Jesse, what about. What about you?
[00:50:07] Speaker A: Yeah, I don't know if I can say it any better than John just did, but yeah, I would say my invitation to folks is to be agents of redemption in the world.
We chose to name our organization Redeem because to redeem is to take those things that have been lost, broken, stolen and destroyed and to pay the price to restore them to what they were created to be.
And what we believe as Christians is that we serve a God of redemption, right, who's redeeming each one of us to himself.
And at the same time, he's asking us to be agents of redemption in a hurting world.
And I think that's what we're all called to be, is to go find those things that have been lost, broken, stolen and destroyed and to pay the price to restore them to what they were created to be. That's how we tell the world a parable of the ultimate redemption story.
And I think that's how we are become disciples of Jesus.
And so if that's. Yeah, if that's giving to Love justice, if that's giving to Hope International, like there are so many organizations that are doing a great thing.
Do that. If it's blowing it all up and changing your career and doing something stupid like I did, like, do that.
But it's a.
We are a body, and the body has many parts, and all of its parts are many. It forms one body. And so do what you were made to do to redeem those things that are broken.
[00:51:45] Speaker C: Amen. Jesse, it was such a pleasure and such a gift to have you on the podcast this morning. We're thankful for you and. And yeah, I'm excited and expectant for how this conversation is going to influence other people. So thanks for your time.
[00:52:00] Speaker A: Yeah, sure. Really grateful for the time. Thanks, guys.
[00:52:04] Speaker B: So great to see you, Jesse.
[00:52:06] Speaker A: We are grateful for the generous support of the Love justice community.
[00:52:10] Speaker B: Please consider joining our family of donors. Learn more at lovejustice ngo.
