The Locust Effect: Why the End of Poverty Requires the End of Violence

The Locust Effect is years of experience, tears that have been wept and lives that have cried out for justice, all rolled up into one script for the world to take notice of. I hope we all learn the lesson that the violence the poor face on a daily basis needs to be addressed or the aid and development work we do can be completely undermined by those that use terror as their tool of choice. Haugen takes you to see the scars and the torture that you’ll never see on normal visit to the poor. The violence that Haugen deals with has largely been ignored because it is hidden by shame and fear of repercussions that the poor live with on a daily basis. Haugen uncovers the corrupt or non-existent legal systems that do nothing to protect the innocent, but instead rob them of justice and their life savings trying to find it. Haugen has done his homework, intelligently backing up his arguments with well researched statistics and drawing in material from all over the world. The Locust Effect should find itself on every university humanitarian course required reading list, in missionary training and on the must read list of anyone who is interested in seeing poverty ended.

A plague of locusts can lay waste to anything and everything in its wake. "The Locust Effect" makes the compelling case that violence (common, everyday person-on-person violence) is laying waste to anything and everything for the poor in the developing world. Our efforts to feed the poor, educate the illiterate, uplift and empower girls and women, combat cultural prejudices, stimulate bruised economies, provide shelter for the homeless cannot and will not succeed unless we change the conversation and start to consider how deeply violence affects the very people we hope to help. We would do well not to simply assume we know what the poor need. When asked, what the poor want most is not education, food, shelter or opportunity - they want to live in safety, without fear that the little they have and those they love could be decimated by evil-doers acting with impunity. They want justice: justice which HAS to come from public justice systems. The thesis of the book is simple: the end of poverty requires the end of violence; and to end violence, countries need functioning public justice systems. This book is a necessary companion to the conversation started by Kristof and Wudunn.

This is a practical guide to helping save the lives of the most vulnerable in the 21st century. "The Locust Effect: Why The End of Poverty Requires The End of Violence" has three major parts. Part 1: THE PROBLEM: In true prosecutorial form, Haugen and Boutros convincingly make the case that there are 2.5 billion people, in the world today, who are not safe and need our help. Citing a report by the United Nations, the book explains "Most poor people do not live under the shelter of the law, but far from the law's protection". Part 2: HOW WE GOT HERE: "Sadly, the public justice systems in the developing world not only fail to protect the poor from violence, but they actually perpetrate violence, protect perpetrators, and make poor people less safe." Part 3: THE SOLUTION In Chapter 10: "It's Been Done Before" and Chapter 11: "Demonstration Projects of Hope", Haugen and Boutros provide real life examples of how reforms have been made to the criminal justice systems in the developing world. It's a glimpse to what is possible when people are awakened to reality of this plague of violence afflicting the poor and we make it a priority to address the complex issues.