Sisters in Chains
Terrify No More
by Gary A. Haugen with Gregg Hunter
W Publishing, 2005
(245 pages, $24.95, hardcover)
reviewed by Cristopher Rapp
Dacie, 14, was on a school break when a family friend offered to get her a job at a noodle shop a few hours from her village. Dacie’s parents gave their blessing, so she packed her belongings and headed out. But when she arrived, her new employer handed her not an apron and noodle spoon, but a bikini top and short skirt—this was not a restaurant, but a brothel, and she would not be allowed to leave.
Because she was a virgin, men would pay a premium for her, more than 700 American dollars. A willing customer arrived later that day. When Dacie screamed as she was being raped, the brothel manager taped her mouth shut so the man’s pleasure would not be disturbed. He was the first of eight men who brutalized her that night.
UNICEF estimates that the sex trade claims a million child victims each year. Terrify No More tells the story of what one organization, the Washington, D.C.-based International Justice Mission (IJM), is doing about it.
Raid & Rescue
Founded in 1994 by Gary Haugen, a former US Department of Justice attorney who headed the UN investigation into the Rwandan genocide, IJM investigates, documents, and litigates human rights cases around the world. An explicitly Christian organization of an Evangelical bent, it receives most of its referrals from Christian relief organizations working overseas.
Terrify No More focuses on IJM’s 2003 investigation in Svay Pak, a seedy community just outside Phnom Penh, Cambodia, consisting almost entirely of brothels. Three times IJM presented local authorities with videotaped evidence that young girls were being bought and sold, but to no effect. The brothels, Haugen explains, are often the most successful businesses in a village. Frequently, IJM’s task is to amass enough evidence to shake the authorities out of their complacency, and then help them to do what they ought to have been doing all along.
This requires mixing with incredibly unsavory characters. IJM’s Will Henry, a former undercover cop, travels to Svay Pak posing as a businessman on vacation and infiltrates the bars. With alarming frankness, one man—an American, incidentally—casually clues Henry into the local brothel scene, offering advice on how to convince the brothel-keepers to let him take more than one girl back to his hotel and on how to avoid suspicion from friends back in the States.
After touring a few of the brothels with a hidden video camera, Henry pays for four girls to be delivered to his hotel room. When they arrive, they are interviewed and spirited off to a safe-house. Meanwhile, with the help of a Cambodian informant, another IJM operative develops a friendship with the dean of the Svay Pak pimps, lowering his guard with dinners and gifts.
The groundwork laid, the team maps out a raid-and-rescue operation to empty out every brothel in Svay Pak. This time the Cambodian authorities agree to help.
Cristopher Rapp is an attorney in West Palm Beach, Florida. He has written for National Review, The American Enterprise, and other publications. He attends Memorial Presbyterian Church in West Palm Beach.
A Journal of Mere Christianity—Delivered to Your Door
- Essays on theology, culture, and the Church
- Contributors from across the Christian traditions
Six print issues (one year) of Touchstone, plus full online access and PDF downloads for only $39.95.
Get a one-year full-access subscription to the Touchstone online archives for only $19.95.
bulk subscriptions
Order Touchstone subscriptions in bulk and save $10 per sub! Each subscription includes 6 issues of Touchstone plus full online access to touchstonemag.com—including archives, videos, and pdf downloads of recent issues for only $29.95 each! Great for churches or study groups.
Transactions will be processed on a secure server.
more from the online archives
32.1—January/February 2019
on Down Syndrome & the Lives That Matter by David F. Watson
27.6—Nov/Dec 2014
Tales of Forbidden Stereotypes
Real-Life Men & Women & the Tragic Loss of Human Comedy by Anthony Esolen
18.4—May 2005
The Idylls, Idols & Devils That Corrupt the Moral Imagination by Vigen Guroian
calling all readers
Please Donate
"There are magazines worth reading but few worth saving . . . Touchstone is just such a magazine."
—Alice von Hildebrand
"Here we do not concede one square millimeter of territory to falsehood, folly, contemporary sentimentality, or fashion. We speak the truth, and let God be our judge. . . . Touchstone is the one committedly Christian conservative journal."
—Anthony Esolen, Touchstone senior editor
