-
To be honest, by personality,
-
I'm just not much of a crier.
-
But I think, in my career,
that's been a good thing.
-
I'm a civiil rights lawyer,
-
and I've seen some
horrible things in the world.
-
I began my career working
police-abuse cases in the United States.
-
And then, In 1994, I was sent to Rwanda
-
to be the director of the
UN's genocide investigation.
-
It turns out that tears
just aren't much help
-
when you're trying
to investigate a genocide.
-
The things I had to see,
and feel and touch,
-
were pretty unspeakable.
-
What I can tell you is this:
-
the Rwandan genocide
was one of the world's
-
greatest failures of simple compassion.
-
The word compassion actually
comes from two Latin words:
-
cum passio, which simply mean
"to suffer with."
-
And the things that I saw and experienced
-
in Rwanda as I got up-close
to human suffering,
-
it did, in moments, move me to tears.
-
But I just wish that I,
and the rest of the world,
-
had just been moved earlier.
-
And not just to tears,
-
but to actually stop the genocide.
-
Now by contrast, I've also
been involved with
-
one of the world's greatest
successes of compassion.
-
And that's the fight against
global poverty.
-
It's a cause that's probably
involved all of us here.
-
I don't know if your first introduction
-
might have been choruses of
"We Are the World",
-
or maybe the picture of a sponsored child
on your refrigerator door,
-
or maybe the birthday you
donated for fresh water.
-
I don't really remember what my first
introduction to poverty was
-
but I do remember the most jarring.
-
It was when I met Venus,
-
she's a mom from Zambia.
-
She's got three kids and she's a widow.
-
When I met her, she had walked
about 12 miles
-
in the only garments she owned,
-
to come to the capital city
and to share her story.
-
She sat down with me for hours
-
-- just ushered me in to
the world of poverty.
-
She described what it was like
when the coals on the cooking fire
-
finally just went completely cold.
-
When that last drop
of cooking oil finally ran out.
-
When the last of the food,
despiete her best efforts,
-
ran out.
-
She had to watch her youngest son, Peter,
-
suffer from malnutrition,
-
as his legs just slowly bowed
into uselessness.
-
As his eyes grew cloudy and dim.
-
And then as Peter finally grew cold.
-
For over 50 years, stories like this
have been moving us to compassion.
-
We whose kids have plenty to eat.
-
And we're moved not only
to care about global poverty,
-
but to actually do our part
to stop the suffering.
-
Now there's plenty of room for critique
that we haven't done enough,
-
and what it is that we've done
hasn't been effective enough,
-
but the truth is this:
-
the fight against global poverty
is probably the broadest,
-
longest running manifestation of the
human phenomenon of compassion
-
in the history of our species.
-
And so I'd like to share
a pretty shattering insight
-
that might forever change the way
you think about that struggle.
-
But first, let me begin with what
you probably already know.
-
35 years ago, when I would have been
graduating from high school,
-
they told us that 40,000 kids died
everyday because of poverty.
-
That number, today, is now
down to 17,000.
-
Way too many, of course,
-
but it does mean that every year,
-
there's 8 million kids who
don't have to die from poverty.
-
Moreover, the number of
people in our world
-
who are living in extreme poverty,
-
which is defined as living off of
about a dollar and a quarter a day,
-
that has fallen from 50 percent,
-
to only 15 percent.
-
This is massive progress,
-
and this exceeds everyone's
expectations about what is possible.
-
And I think you and I,
-
I think, honestly, that we can
feel proud and encouraged
-
to see the way compassion
actually has the power
-
to succeed in stopping
the suffering of millions.
-
But here's the part that you
might not hear very much about.
-
If you move that poverty mark just
up to two dollars a day,
-
it turns out that virtually
the same 2 billion people
-
who were stuck in that harsh poverty
when I was in high school,
-
are still stuck there,
-
35 years later.
-
So why, why are so many billions
still stuck in such harsh poverty?
-
Well let's think about Venus for a moment.
-
Now for decades, my wife and I have been
moved by common compassion
-
to sponsor kids, to fund micro loans,
-
to support generous levels of foreign aid.
-
But until I had actually talked to Venus,
-
I would have had no idea that
none of those appraoches
-
actually addressed why she had
to watch her son die.
-
"We were doing fine," Venus told me.
-
"Until Brutus started to cause trouble."
-
Now Brutus is Venus' neighbor
and "caused trouble"
-
is what happened the day after
Venus' husband died.
-
When Brutus just came and threw
Venus and the kids out of the house
-
stole all their land, and robbed
their market stall.
-
You see, Venus was thrown
into destitution by violence.
-
And then it occurred to me, of course,
-
that none of my child sponsorships,
none of my micro loans,
-
none of the traditional
anti-poverty programs
-
were going to stop Brutus,
-
because they weren't meant to.
-
This became became even more clear
to me when I met Griselda.
-
She's a marvelous young girl
living in a very poor community
-
in Guatemala.
-
And one of the things
we've learned over the years
-
is that perhaps the most powerful thing
-
that Griselda and her family can do
-
to get Griselda and her family
out of poverty
-
is to make sure that she goes to school.
-
The experts call this "The Girl Effect."
-
But when met Griselda,
she wasn't going to school.
-
In fact, she was rarely ever
leaving her home.
-
Days before we met her,
-
while she was walking home
from church with her family,
-
in broad daylight,
-
men from community
just snatched her off the street,
-
and violently raped her.
-
See, Griselda had every
opportunity to go to school,
-
it just wasn't safe for her to get there.
-
And Griselda's not the only one.
-
Around the world, poor women and girls,
-
between the ages of 15 and 44,
-
they are -- when victims of
the everyday violence
-
of domestic abuse and sexual violence --
-
those two forms of violence account
for more death and disability
-
than malaria, than car accidents,
than war combined.
-
The truth is, the poor of our world
are trapped in whole systems of violence.
-
In South Asia, for instance,
I could drive past this rice mill
-
and this man hoisting
these 100 pound sacks
-
of rice upon his thin back.
-
But I would have no idea, until later,
-
that he was actually a slave,
-
held by violence in that rice mill
since I was in high school.
-
Decades of anti-poverty programs
right in his community
-
were never able to rescue him
or any of the hundred other slaves
-
from the beatings and rapes
and the torture
-
of violence inside the rice mill.
-
In fact, half a century of
anti-poverty programs
-
have left more poor people in slavery
-
than in any other time in human history.
-
Experts tell us that there's about
35 million people in slavery today.
-
That's about the population
of the entire nation of Canada,
-
where we're sitting today.
-
This is why, over time, I have come
to call this epidemic of violence
-
"The Locust Effect".
-
Because in the lives of the poor,
it just descends like a plague
-
and it destroys everything.
-
In fact, now when you survey
very, very poor communities,
-
residents will tell you that their
greatest fear is violence.
-
But notice that the violence they fear,
-
is not the violence of
genocide or the wars,
-
it's everyday violence.
-
So for me, as a lawyer, of course,
my first reaction was to think,
-
"We need to change all the laws.
-
We gotta make all this violence
against the poor illegal."
-
But then I found out, it already is.
-
The problem is not that
the poor don't get laws,
-
it's that they don't get law enforcement.
-
In the developing world,
-
basic law enforcement systems
are so broken
-
that recently the UN issued
a report that found that
-
"most poor people live outside
the protection of law."
-
Now honestly, you and I have
just about no idea
-
of what that would mean
-
because we have no
first-hand experience of it.
-
Functioning law enforcement for us
is just a total assumption.
-
In fact, nothing expresses that assumption
-
more clearly than three simple numbers:
-
9-1-1,
-
which, of course, is the number
of the emergency police operator
-
here in Canada and in the United States,
-
where the average response time
to a police 911 emergency call
-
is about 10 minutes.
-
So we take this just
completely for granted.
-
But what if there was no
law enforcement to protect you?
-
A woman in Oregon recently
experienced what this would be like.
-
She was home alone in her
dark house on a Saturday night,
-
when a man started to tear
his way into her home.
-
This was her worst nightmare
because this man
-
had actually put her in the hospital
from an assault just two weeks before.
-
So terrified, she picks up that phone
and does what any of us would do:
-
she calls 9-1-1.
-
But only to learn that because
of budget cuts in her county,
-
law enforcement wasn't available
on the weekends.
-
Listen:
-
9-1-1 dispatcher: I don't have anybody to send out there.
-
Woman: OK
-
9-1-1: Umm, obviously if he comes inside
the residents and assaults you,
-
can you ask him to go away?
-
Or do you know if he is intoxicated
or anything?
-
Woman: I've already asked him.
I've already told him I was calling you.
-
He's broken in before, busted down my door,
-
assaulted me.
-
9-1-1: Uh-huh.
-
Woman: Um, yeah, so...
-
9-1-1: Is there any way you could safely
leave the residence?
-
Woman: No, I can't, because he's blocking,
pretty much, my only way out.
-
9-1-1: Well the only thing I can do
is give you some advice,
-
and call the sheriff's office tomorrow.
-
Obviously, if he comes in and unfortunately
has a weapon or is trying to cause
-
you physical harm, that's a different story.
-
You know, the sheriff's office doesn't
work up here.
-
I don't have anybody to send."
-
Gary Haugen: Tragically, the woman
inside that house
-
was violently assaulted, choked
and raped
-
because this is what it means to live
outside the rule of law.
-
And this is where billions of our poorest live.
-
What does that look like?
-
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 for every going to jail
for that crime.
-
In South Asia, if you enslave a poor person,
-
you're at greater risk of being
struck by lightening
-
than 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 2 dollar a day hell.
-
Cause 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 longterm impact of your efforts.
-
So you would think that
the disintegration of basic law enforcement
-
in the developing world would be a
huge priority for
-
the global fight against poverty.
-
But it's not.
-
Auditors of international assistance
recently couldn't find
-
even 1 percent of aid going
to protect the poor
-
from the lawless chaos of everyday violence.
-
And honestly, when we do talk about
violence against the poor,
-
sometimes it's in the weirdest of ways.
-
A fresh water organization tells
a heart wrenching story
-
of girls who are raped on the way
to fetching water,
-
then celebrates the solution
of a new well
-
that drastically shortens their walk.
-
End of story.
-
But not a word about the rapists
who are still out there in the community.
-
If a young woman on one
of our collage campuses
-
was raped on her walk
to the library,
-
we wouldn't never celebrate the solution
of moving the library closer to the dorm.
-
And yet, for some reason,
-
this is okay for poor people.
-
Now the truth is, the traditional experts
in economic development
-
and poverty alleviation,
-
they don't know how to fix this problem.
-
And so what happens?
-
They don't talk about it.
-
But the more fundamental reason
-
that law enforcement for the poor
in the developing world
-
is so neglected,
-
is because the people inside
the developing world, with money,
-
don't need it.
-
I was at the world economic forum,
not long ago,
-
talking to corporate executives who have
massive businesses in the developing world,
-
and I was just asking them,
-
"How do you guys protect all your people
and property from all the violence?"
-
And they looked at each other,
and they said, practically in unison,
-
"We buy it."
-
Indeed, private security forces
in the developing world
-
are now, four, five and seven times
larger than the public police force.
-
In Africa, the largest employer
on the continent now
-
is private security.
-
But you see, the rich can pay for safety
and can keep getting richer,
-
but the poor can't pay for it
-
and they're left totally unprotected
-
and they keep getting thrown
to the ground.
-
This is a massive and scandalous outrage.
-
And it doesn't have to be this way.
-
Broken law enforcement can be fixed.
-
Violence can be stopped.
-
Almost all criminal justice systems,
-
they start out broken and corrupt,
-
but they can be transformed
by fierce effort and commitment.
-
The path forward is really pretty clear.
-
Number one: we have to start making
-
stopping violence indispensible
in the fight against poverty.
-
In fact, any conversation about
global poverty
-
that doesn't include the problem of violence
-
must be deemed not serious.
-
And secondly, we have to begin
to seriously invest
-
resources and shares expertise
-
to support the developing world
-
as they fashion new, public systems of justice,
-
not private security,
-
that gives everybody a chance to be safe.
-
These transformations
are actually possible
-
and they're happening today.
-
Recently, the Gates Foundation
funded a project
-
in the second largest city in the Philippines,
-
where local advocates and local
law enforcement
-
were able to transform corrupt police
and broken courts so drastically,
-
that in just four short years,
-
they were able to measurably reduce
-
the commercial sexual violence
against poor kids
-
by 79 percent.
-
You know, from the hindsight of history,
-
What's always most inexplicable
and inexcusable
-
are the simple failures of compassion.
-
Because 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 to 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 cause they were trying to
register to vote?"
-
Likewise, when our grandchildren ask us,
-
"Grandma, Grandpa, where were you
-
when 2 billion of the world's poorest
were drowning
-
in the lawless chaos of everyday violence?"
-
I hope we can say that we had compassion,
-
that we raised our voice,
-
and as a generation,
-
were moved to make the violence stop.
-
Thank you very much.
-
(Applause)
-
Chris Anderson: Really powerfully argued,
-
talk to us a little bit about
some of the things
-
that have actually been happening to,
for example, boost police training.
-
How hard a process is that?
-
Gary Haugen: Well one of the glorious
things that 's starting to happen now
-
is that the collapse of these systems
-
and consequences are becoming obvious.
-
There's actually, now, political will
to do that.
-
But it just requires now a investment
of resources and transfer of expertise.
-
There's a political-will struggle
that's going to take place,
-
but those are winnable fights
-
because we've done some examples
around the world
-
at International Justice Mission
that are very encouraging.
-
CA: So just tell us in one country,
how much it costs
-
to make a material difference
to police, for example,
-
I know that's only one piece of it.
-
GH: In Guatemala, for instance,
we've started a project
-
there with the local police
and court system, prosecutors,
-
to retrain them so that they can
actually effectively bring these cases.
-
And we've seen prosecutions against
perpetrators of sexual violence
-
increase by more than 1000 percent.
-
This project has been very modestly funded
at about 1 million dollars a year,
-
and the kind of bang you can get
for your buck
-
in terms of leveraging
a criminal justice system
-
that could function if it were properly
trained and motivated and led,
-
and these countries, especially a middle class
-
that's is seeing that seeing that
there is really no future
-
with this totally instability and
total privatization of security
-
I think there's an opportunity,
-
a window for change.
-
CA: But to make this happen,
-
you have to look at each part in the chain:
-
the police, who else?
-
GH: So, that's the thing about law enforcement,
-
it starts out with the police,
-
they're the front end of the sort of
pipeline of justice
-
but they hand if off to the prosecutors,
-
and the prosecutors hand it off
to the courts,
-
and the survivors of violence
have to be supported by social services
-
all the way through that,
-
you have to do an approach
that pools that all together.
-
In the past, there's bit a little bit
of training of the courts,
-
but they get crappy evidence from the police,
-
or a little police intervention that
has to do with narcotics or terrorism
-
but nothing to do with treating
the common, poor person
-
with excellent law enforcement,
-
so it's about pulling it all together,
-
and you can actually have people
in very poor communities
-
experience law enforcement like us,
-
which is imperfect in our own experience,
-
but boy, is it a great thing to sense
that you can call 9-1-1
-
and maybe someone will protect you.
-
CA: Gary, I think you've done
a spectacular job
-
of bringing this to the world's attention
-
in your book and right here today.
-
Thanks so much.
-
Gary Haugen.
-
(Applause)