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

by Gary A. Haugen

In the lives of the poor, violence has the power to destroy everything—and is unstopped by our other responses to their poverty. This makes sense because it can also be said of other acute needs of the poor. Severe hunger and disease can also destroy everything for a poor person—and the things that stop hunger don’t necessarily stop disease, and the things that stop disease don’t necessarily address hunger. The difference is that the world knows that poor people suffer from hunger and disease—and the world gets busy trying to meet those needs. But, the world overwhelmingly does not know that endemic to being poor is a vulnerability to violence, or the way violence is, right now, catastrophically crushing the global poor. As a result, the world is not getting busy trying to stop it. And, in a perfect tragedy, the failure to address that violence is actually devastating much of the other things good people are seeking to do to assist them.

When we think of global poverty we readily think of hunger, disease, homelessness, illiteracy, dirty water, and a lack of education, but very few of us immediately think of the global poor’s chronic vulnerability to violence—the massive epidemic of sexual violence, forced labor, illegal detention, land theft, assault, police abuse, and oppression that lies hidden underneath the more visible deprivations of the poor. Indeed, I am not even speaking of the large-scale spasmodic events of violence like the Rwandan genocide, or wars and civil conflicts which occasionally engulf the poor and generate headlines. Rather, I am speaking of the reality my IJM colleagues introduced to me in the years that followed my time in Rwanda—the reality of common, criminal violence in otherwise stable developing countries that afflicts far more of the global poor on a much larger and more persistent scale—and consistently frustrates and blocks their climb out of poverty.

violence has a devastating impact on a poor person’s struggle out of poverty, seriously undermines economic development in poor countries, and directly reduces the effectiveness of poverty alleviation efforts. It turns out that you can provide all manner of goods and services to the poor, as good people have been doing for decades, but if you are not restraining the bullies in the community from violence and theft—as we have been failing to do for decades—then we are going to find the outcomes of our efforts quite disappointing.

basic law enforcement systems in the developing world are so broken that global studies now confirm that most poor people live outside the protection of law. Indeed, the justice systems in the developing world make the poor poorer and less secure. It’s as if the world woke up to find that hospitals in the developing world actually made poor people sicker—or the water systems actually contaminated the drinking water of the poor.

the failure to respond to such a basic need—to prioritize criminal justice systems that can protect poor people from common violence—has had a devastating impact on two great struggles that made heroic progress in the last century but have stalled out for the poorest in the twenty-first century: namely, the struggle to end severe poverty and the fight to secure the most basic human rights.

when the colonial powers left the developing world a half a century ago, many of the laws changed but the law enforcement systems did not—systems that were never designed to protect the common people from violence but to protect the regime from the common people. These systems, it turns out, were never re-engineered.

In rural Peru, they explained, if you are a victim of a crime and you want the law enforcement system to seek justice on your behalf, you have to pay for it. Period. José and Richard acknowledge this can sound strange for people from the developed world, where relatively well-financed public justice systems pay for police investigators, prosecutors and examining magistrates to seek justice on behalf of the victims of violent crime—indeed, in developed countries these violent offenses are considered a crime against the state. But in Peru—and much of the developing world—these services must be purchased. While wealthy and powerful perpetrators will definitely pay to defend themselves (legitimately and illegitimately), poor people, living off $1.00 to $2.50 dollars a day, simply cannot. So their cases do not move forward, there is no justice for those who abuse them, and there is no meaningful deterrent to stop it from happening again.

“They just dismiss us and say, ‘I can’t help you,’ when they see we do not have money. We don’t get justice,” they said simply and painfully, “because we are poor.”

The word slavery is so powerful that, to me, there is something obscene and sensationalizing to lightly suggest that such a grotesque atrocity is taking place on any meaningful scale today. But the shocking truth is this: There are more slaves in the world today (best estimate—27 million) than were extracted from Africa during 400 years of the transatlantic slave trade.

And given the shame, the fear, and the hopelessness, Laura is unlikely to tell anyone what is happening either. From La Unión, to Bangalore, to Nairobi, this is the most deeply hidden layer of what it means to be poor: the dark humiliation and debasement of being assaulted and hurt by other people. Relentlessly, every day, from every side, Laura knows that she is not safe—and the predators all around her know it, too.

It’s true that each aspect of poverty is exacerbated by other factors, but it does no good to solve those related factors in the absence of the direct solution. Sometimes the exacerbating factor is so acute that it can render the direct solution nearly useless—but solving the exacerbating factor is always inadequate in the absence of the direct solution. That is why, at this critical inflection point in the fight against global poverty, we must clearly elevate an aspect of poverty in our world that is both underappreciated and very distinct. In other words, people do not commonly see it as intrinsic to the problem of poverty—and if they do, they commonly try to address it by solving the exacerbating factors without first prioritizing the direct solution.

Violence is as much a part of what it means to be poor as being hungry, sick, homeless, or jobless. In fact, as we shall see, violence is frequently the problem that poor people are most concerned about. It is one of the core reasons they are poor in the first place, and one of the primary reasons they stay poor. Indeed, we will simply never be able to win the battle against extreme poverty unless we address it.

I became mesmerized by two realities in my affluent, white-collar, professional world: first, the massive amount of grief that is all around us all the time in our work-a-day reality (from death, cancer, suicide, dementia, infidelity, failure, addiction, etc.), and secondly, the way we almost never see it. We readily see other more external struggles. But grief? We would have to go very deep to see that.

no modern society that thrives tries to address violence by addressing these exacerbating factors in the absence of a functioning law enforcement capacity to provide an effective restraint and credible deterrent to acts of violence.

One out of three women around the world has been beaten, forced into sex, or otherwise abused in her lifetime.26 The rates of violence against women and girls are even higher among poor women.

the World Bank has estimated that the epidemic of gender violence kills and disables more women and girls between the ages of 15 and 44 than cancer, traffic accidents, malaria, and war combined.

The poor are especially susceptible to these schemes of deception because the desperation of their economic situation makes them (and their parents or caretakers) more willing to suspend their disbelief, set aside their suspicions, and take greater risks. Their poverty frequently also means they are more likely to be less educated, more naïve, less sophisticated, deferential to people of higher status, and less accustomed to asserting themselves—and therefore easier for confident schemers to deceive. For reasons one can readily anticipate, all of these vulnerabilities are vastly multiplied if the female in poverty is a child.

if you look at all the deceptive schemes of the sex trafficker, almost all of them are intended to separate the woman or the girl from her family and community (where she might know who to turn to and how to turn for help). And for the poor, the most compelling reason to leave your family and your community is the promise of economic opportunity somewhere else. Moreover, if that job opportunity outside the community might potentially benefit the family with increased shared income (which is the way any single family member’s job prospects are generally viewed)—then the family is actually recruited to the task of encouraging the targeted victim to leave the family and the community.

The harshness, desperation, and pressure of poverty in the developing world leave many with weaker protections in the family and community. People living in poverty are often separated from the protections of both the family unit and the community by long hours of distance, and unsteady or migratory work.

about 11 million slaves were extracted from Africa during four hundred years of the trans-Atlantic slave trade66—which is as little as half of the number of people held in slavery in our world this year.

there are so many thoughtful people who suddenly feel a sense of relief when the concept of “debt” is introduced into a discussion of modern slavery. “Oh. Ok,” we say to ourselves. “It’s not real slavery—it’s just some substandard and exploitive labor situation that’s probably sad and unfair, but it’s not the kind of slavery where you lose all your freedom and are forced through violence to work for another person.” Well, unfortunately it is. Slavery is about the total coercive control of another human being; in bonded labor, nothing could make that control more clear than the owner’s power to beat his laborers to death with impunity.

“Whenever I hear anyone arguing for slavery,” Lincoln said, “I feel a strong impulse to see it tried on him personally.”

the fundamentals of bonded slavery are exceedingly simple. You use a loan to lure someone to work for you under conditions in which 1) they cannot leave until they repay the debt, and 2) they have no say in how much they get paid for their work. Under such conditions, it’s impossible for them to pay off the debt because the lender simply never pays them enough to pay them back—and they can’t go anywhere else to earn money to pay it off. And, if they can’t leave, they have to “buy” food and shelter from the lender to stay alive—at whatever price the lender sets and as part of a debt that accumulates in perpetuity. There is just one essential ingredient to the whole scheme: the over-arching threat of force to keep them from leaving—which is legitimated because they have “taken the lender’s money,” and he is just restraining them from “stealing.”

The terror of poverty lies in the poor person’s vulnerability to violence. The poor are anxious about food and how they will feed their children. They dread the weakness and waste of disease. They feel overwhelmed and demoralized by the lack of jobs or education or opportunity. But they feel terror in the face of violence—when someone stronger is coming in rage to hurt them. And to be poor means you are never safe from the terror. You are not safe at the bus station, in the market, on the way to school, at the well, in the fields, in the factory, in the alleyways. Most terribly, you are not safe in your own home; not just because the bully may be in your home—but because the bullies may come to take your home, at any time, day or night.

Most of the world’s poorest people live in circumstances in which they can be summarily thrown out of their homes and off their land because there is no reliable record keeping system for accurately demonstrating who owns the land and the property—and even if there were, there is little willingness or no capacity to actually enforce those rights on behalf of the poor.

In the absence of clear and documented legal rights to property, there are two other social forces that step into the vacuum and settle who gets what: 1) brute force, and 2) traditional cultural norms. And under both influences women generally lose—and brutally so.

To make it more concrete, one of the ways economists measure the costs of violence is by counting the aggregate years of productive life that violence takes away through disability. They call this measure the Disability Adjusted Life Years (DALY). Now, try to fathom the fact that 9 million years of disability adjusted life years are lost each year worldwide as a result of rape and domestic violence against women.24 Now think about food production in Africa and the fact that women do almost all the work (80 percent). Imagine the impact on food production and on the tenuous economy of the poor as millions of Disability Adjusted Life Years are lost every year by women in Africa because of violence. Likewise, in India, a survey of women in Nagpur found that 13 percent of women had missed paid work because they were being beaten and abused in the home—that, on average, they had to miss a week and a half of work per incident.25 In Nicaragua, researchers found that women who were abused earned about half of what other women earned in wages.

even the fear of violence had the capacity to “paralyze development at the grassroots. If development is the process of building societies that work,” they concluded, then “crime acts as a kind of ‘anti-development,’ destroying the trust relations on which society is based.”33 There is evidence that people living in fear of violence unproductively divert resources to security measures, and the payment of bribes and protection money; are risk-averse, less entrepreneurial, and prone to short-term economic decision-making; and are discouraged from accumulating assets or opening a business.

the poor are the ones who can never afford to have any bad luck. They can’t get an infection because they don’t have access to any medicine. They can’t get sick or miss their bus or get injured because they will lose their menial labor job if they don’t show up for work. They can’t misplace their pocket change because it’s actually the only money they have left for food. They can’t have their goats get sick because it’s the only source of milk they have. On and on it goes. Of course the bad news is, everybody has bad luck. It’s just that most of us have margins of resources and access to support that allow us to weather the storm, because we’re not trying to live off $2.00 a day.

law enforcement’s capacity to ratchet up the criminal’s costs and perceived risks reduces his willingness to commit acts of violence.

To be effective, law enforcement must work in tandem with other interventions that address other complex social causes of violence—cultural norms, gender bias, economic desperation and inequality, lack of education, marginalization of vulnerable groups, etc. But these interventions will never be successful in the absence of a reasonably functional public justice system that restrains, brings to justice, and deters violent predators.

Martin Luther King, Jr. said with characteristic simplicity and clarity: It may be true that the law cannot change the heart but it can restrain the heartless. It may be true that the law cannot make a man love me but it can keep him from lynching me and I think that is pretty important.12 In fact, enforcement of the law can powerfully accelerate the transformation of cultural attitudes by bringing to bear public sanction—as Americans have seen in segregation, domestic violence, drunk driving and smoking.

It may be true that the law cannot change the heart but it can restrain the heartless. It may be true that the law cannot make a man love me but it can keep him from lynching me and I think that is pretty important.

Nine African countries have a combined population of over 114 million people, and yet between them they only have 2,550 lawyers—the same number of lawyers that practice in the state of Vermont, which has a population of about 600,000 people.52 The actual availability of lawyers to common citizens in Africa is even worse than these numbers indicate because most Africans still live in rural areas and overwhelmingly the lawyers are in distant cities. In fact, in Tanzania, with 42 million people, most of the country’s 21 regions don’t have any lawyers; in Uganda, lawyers can be found in only nine of the country’s 56 districts.53

We’ve seen the way lawless violence can destroy economic opportunity for the poor and keep them trapped in poverty (see Chapter 3) and the way broken justice systems exacerbate the problem. But on the flip side, a massive, ambitious, and little-known study from the World Bank makes an intriguing argument that justice systems are themselves a key contributor to the development of nation’s economic wealth. It turns out that addressing the dysfunctions of broken justice systems may be one of the most powerful ways to secure the poor’s capacity for creating wealth.

As David Brooks of the New York Times has opined with characteristic common sense and clarity: You can cram all the nongovernmental organizations you want into a country, but if there is no rule of law and if the ruling class is predatory then your achievements won’t add up to much…In short, there’s only so much good you can do unless you are willing to confront corruption, venality, and disorder head-on.68 As Crisis Group board member Lord Paddy Ashdown, UN High Representative in Bosnia-Herzegovina, stated, “In hindsight, we should have put the establishment of the rule of law first, for everything else depends on it: a functioning economy, a free and fair political system, the development of civil society, public confidence in police and the courts.”