Narrator: In the remote Andean town of La Unión, Peru, an eight-year-old girl named Yuri attended her brother's sixth-grade graduation party. During the celebration, she went upstairs to the residence of the party hall's owners and was never seen alive again. The next morning, her small body was found in the street, showing signs of brutal sexual assault and murder. Her family, devastated, found a bloody mattress and Yuri's clothing in the owners' home. But as soon as they did, a lawyer for the wealthy family appeared, and the evidence began to vanish. The town prosecutor allowed the family's lawyer to be present at the autopsy, where crucial biological samples were discarded. The lawyer then took Yuri's clothing from her mother, Lucila, claiming to be her lawyer, and the clothes disappeared forever. In the end, despite overwhelming evidence, the owners were acquitted. An innocent young man was coerced into a confession and sentenced to thirty years in prison. Lucila, a poor, hardworking mother, was left with no justice, explaining simply, "We don't get justice... because we are poor."

This heartbreaking story is not an anomaly. It is a window into a hidden global crisis, a reality explored in depth by Gary A. Haugen and Victor Boutros in their book, The Locust Effect: Why the End of Poverty Requires the End of Violence. The book argues that the global fight against poverty has a massive blind spot: it has failed to address the plague of everyday, common violence that devastates the lives of the poor and undermines every effort to help them.

Narrator: In 1875, a family of six living in St. Clair County, Missouri, was on the verge of escaping hardship. After years of toil, good rains had produced a promising crop. But one afternoon, the sky darkened with what would become the largest swarm of locusts ever recorded in human history. In a matter of hours, the insects devoured everything—every spear of wheat, every vegetable, even the wool off live sheep. All the family's hard work, all their hope for the future, was obliterated. Within days, all six had starved to death.

Haugen and Boutros use this devastating historical event as a central metaphor for what they call "the locust effect." They argue that for the global poor, everyday violence acts just like that plague of locusts. Well-meaning development programs can provide seeds, tools, education, and micro-loans, but if a family is not safe from violence, their progress can be wiped out in an instant. What good is a new school if girls like Laura are raped on their way to class? What good is a micro-loan if an entrepreneur like Bruno is falsely arrested and his business is destroyed? What good are farming tools if a widow like Susan has her land violently stolen by a neighbor? The authors contend that the international community has focused on providing the "inputs" for development while completely ignoring the plague of violence that consumes them. If people are not safe, nothing else matters.

Narrator: When we think of developing countries, we often assume they have justice systems that are simply weaker or less resourced than those in the West. The authors argue this is a profound misunderstanding. For the vast majority of the poor, the public justice system is not just weak; it is functionally non-existent. It is, as they put it, an "emperor with no clothes."

They use the analogy of a grandfather's old, rusty truck. It has all the parts of a truck—wheels, an engine, a steering wheel—but it hasn't run in decades and now serves only as a hideout for snakes. Similarly, many developing countries have the institutions of justice on paper—police, courts, and laws—but for the poor, these institutions provide no actual protection. In fact, they are often a source of danger.

The book is filled with stories that illustrate this brokenness. In the slums of Nairobi, men like Caleb and Bruno are arbitrarily arrested by police, not for any crime, but for extortion. They are beaten and tortured until their families pay a bribe. For them, the police are not protectors but "just another gang." In India, a man convicted of holding dozens of people in slavery for years is sentenced by a judge to be detained only "until the rising of the court"—a sentence of a few hours. In Malawi, the Director of Public Prosecutions, with a staff of just 35 lawyers for a country of 15 million, admits that his office is so overwhelmed that files on the accused are simply put on shelves to gather dust, leaving men like Lackson Sikayenera to rot in prison for years without a trial. This is not a system that is merely struggling; it is a system that has completely collapsed for the people who need it most.

Narrator: To understand why these justice systems are so dysfunctional, Haugen and Boutros trace their origins back to the colonial era. The police forces and legal structures in many developing nations were not created to protect the common person. They were designed by colonial powers for a single purpose: to control the indigenous population and protect the interests of the colonial regime. They were instruments of oppression, not public service.

When colonial powers departed, a revolution that should have happened never did. The new national elites and authoritarian rulers found these systems of control to be perfectly suited to their own purposes. The police forces were never re-engineered to serve and protect the public; they simply continued to serve the powerful. The hat changed, but the face of oppression remained the same.

This colonial legacy is still felt today. In Senegal, for example, the Code of Military Justice, a relic of French rule, gives the executive branch a de facto veto over any judicial proceedings against security forces, ensuring impunity for abusive authorities. In Indonesia, agrarian land laws rooted in the colonial state's power to seize land are still used to dispossess poor communities. The system was never meant to work for the people, and it still doesn't.

Narrator: The utter failure of public justice systems has led to a dangerous trend: the privatization of justice. The wealthy and powerful in the developing world have not waited for public systems to be fixed. They have simply opted out. As one corporate executive at the World Economic Forum in Davos told the authors when asked how his company secures its assets in the developing world, "We buy it."

This has created a booming market for private security. In countries like Guatemala, Brazil, and India, private security guards now vastly outnumber public police officers. Elites hire their own protection, and for resolving disputes, they turn to private arbitration, bypassing the corrupt and clogged public courts.

This creates a vicious downward spiral. As the influential and wealthy abandon the public system, they no longer have any incentive to advocate or pay for its improvement. The public system, starved of political will and resources, deteriorates even further, becoming even more useless for the poor who have no other choice. This dynamic is made worse by the fact that some elites actively benefit from a broken system. A corrupt system, as seen in the case of Yuri's murderers, allows the powerful to purchase impunity for the crimes they commit against the poor.

Narrator: Given the scale of this crisis, one might assume the international aid community would be heavily invested in fixing it. However, the authors reveal a "scandalous underinvestment" in this area. For decades, major aid agencies like USAID and the World Bank were effectively prohibited by their own policies from funding foreign police forces, a reaction to U.S. support for abusive, paramilitary police during the Cold War. While some of these restrictions have eased, the focus of "rule of law" funding has been on agendas like post-conflict reconstruction, fighting transnational crime, or improving the business climate—not on protecting the common poor from everyday violence.

The result is that a shockingly small fraction, estimated at just 1 to 2 percent of foreign aid, is directed at building the basic criminal justice systems the poor desperately need. But this neglect, the authors argue, is also a source of hope. The problem is not that building these systems has been tried and found impossible; it is that it has been found hard, and largely left untried.

And there are glimmers of hope. The book highlights "demonstration projects" that prove transformation is possible. In Cebu, Philippines, a project called "Project Lantern" worked with local authorities to train police, prosecutors, and social workers to enforce existing laws against child sex trafficking. After four years, they documented a 79 percent reduction in the number of girls being victimized in the commercial sex trade. This was achieved not by reducing poverty, but by making the justice system actually work. These projects show that with focused effort and local collaboration, even deeply broken systems can be reformed to protect the vulnerable.

Narrator: The single most important takeaway from The Locust Effect is that the global conversation about poverty is fundamentally incomplete. For decades, the world has tried to fight poverty with food, medicine, and education, all while a plague of violence has devoured the progress. The book makes a powerful case that you cannot build a house in a hurricane. Safety from violence is not a luxury of development; it is a precondition for it.

The book's most challenging idea is that the systems we in the developed world take for granted—the belief that if we are harmed, someone will help—are the very systems that are absent for billions. The challenge it leaves is to change this reality. It demands that we stop ignoring the violence and start investing in the one thing that can restrain the heartless: a justice system that works for everyone.