From Gary Haugen, founder of International Justice Mission:
“When you survey very, very poor communities, residents will tell you that their greatest fear is violence.”
“The problem is not that the poor don’t get laws, it’s that they don’t get law enforcement.”
“In Bolivia, for example, if a man sexually assaults a poor child, statistically, he’s at greater risk of slipping in the shower and dying than he is of ever going to jail for that crime. In South Asia, if you enslave a poor person, you’re at greater risk of being struck by lightning than ever being sent to jail for that crime.
And so the epidemic of everyday violence, it just rages on. And it devastates our efforts to try to help billions of people out of their two-dollar-a-day hell. Because the data just doesn’t lie.It turns out that you can give all manner of goods and services to the poor, but if you don’t restrain the hands of the violent bullies from taking it all away, you’re going to be very disappointed in the long-term impact of your efforts.”
“I think history convenes a tribunal of our grandchildren and they just ask us, “Grandma, Grandpa, where were you?
Where were you, Grandpa, when the Jews were fleeing Nazi Germany and were being rejected from our shores? Where were you?
And Grandma, where were you when they were marching our Japanese-American neighbors off to internment camps?
And Grandpa, where were you when they were beating our African-American neighbors just because they were trying to register to vote?”
Likewise, when our grandchildren ask us, “Grandma, Grandpa, where were you when two billion of the world’s poorest were drowning in a lawless chaos of everyday violence?” I hope we can say that we had compassion, that we raised our voice, and as a generation, we were moved to make the violence stop.”
I highly recommend the TED talk from which I took these quotes. Click here.
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