Violence Fights Back

Unlike hunger or homelessness or illiteracy, if you try to attack the problem, it will attack you. Violence fights back. One of the places we have seen this most starkly is in IJM’s fight against slavery. As hard as it is to believe, there are millions of people in the developing world who live and die as slaves. Not as metaphorical slaves, but as actual slaves—about twenty-five million, experts say. My colleagues and I have met thousands of them.

Some are as young as a little four-year-old girl named Devi. Devi labored as a slave in a rice mill in South Asia. My IJM colleagues bravely infiltrated the hidden slave operation and rescued her and more than thirty other slaves forced by sheer terror to toil seven days a week inside the concrete walls of the rice mill. Devi’s emancipation document from the government certifies that she was “forced to work under physical threat to her life.” Of course, Devi didn’t become a slave accidentally or by bad luck. The slave owners planned and conspired to hold her and her family as slaves through the power of violence.