The prisoners looked generally emaciated and exhausted, but one man was animated. He leaned over to discuss his case with a lawyer who sat on the bench behind him. The bone-thin detainee, who was wearing a grimy lime-green oxford shirt and gray slacks barely held up by a belt, was Duncan Mutungi. He was not a political prisoner being abused by an autocratic state; he was a night watchman who had once earned thirty dollars a month for guarding a gated community in Nairobi. In 2006, a group of armed men had abducted him, dumping him miles away, at the side of a road. Desperate to keep his job, on which his wife and three children depended, he had staggered back to his place of employment, only to discover that his assailants had stolen one of the cars that he was supposed to guard. When Mutungi reported the crime to the police, he was charged with car theft and told that he faced seven years in jail. Mutungi's fortunes changed when he received a visit from a lawyer with the International Justice Mission, a legal organization based in Washington, D.C. Ronald Rogo, a twenty-six-year-old Kenyan lawyer employed by the mission, took his case.

That morning, I had ridden to the courthouse with Rogo and the mission's American founder, Gary Haugen. During the half-hour traffic-clogged journey, Haugen quizzed Rogo about Mutungi's case. "Tell me to stop at any point," Haugen told Rogo. "You probably need some time to clear your head."

"I am prepared, boss," Rogo said, smiling.

Earlier that morning, Haugen had asked Joe Kibugu, the field director of the mission's Nairobi office, "What effect will it have if a pack of mzungu"-white people-"enter the courtroom? Will it help Duncan? Will it hurt?" Kibugu had said that he thought it would not hurt, and might help.

Haugen, who was educated at Harvard and at the University of Chicago Law School, is a forty-five-year-old evangelical Christian who believes that Christians have generally ignored the Biblical injunction to "seek justice, protect the oppressed, defend the orphan, plead for the widow." In 1997, he created the International Justice Mission to offer legal services to the poor in developing countries. Haugen believes that the biggest problem on earth is not too little democracy, or too much poverty, or too few anti-retroviral AIDS medicines, but, rather, an absence of proper law enforcement.

Three hundred Christian lawyers, criminal investigators, social workers, and advocates at Haugen's mission now work with local law-enforcement officials in twelve countries on behalf of individuals in need: bonded laborers, children who have been sold into prostitution, widows who have had their land seized, poor people who, like Mutungi, languish in jail for crimes they did not commit. Though Haugen recognizes the inequities of the United States' justice system, he decided that he could achieve more by working abroad. According to a report released in June by the United Nations Development Programme, four billion people live in places with dysfunctional justice systems-abusive police, entrenched bribery, mismanaged courts. "These people don't get a sleepy lawyer or a crummy lawyer-they get nada," Haugen said, after finding a seat in the courtroom. "The colonial powers who built justice systems in the Third World never intended to serve these people. Colonial justice was designed to control these people. Then, in the nineteen-sixties, the colonial powers left, and the justice systems stayed. Nobody, when we started international development, said, 'Let's revamp the public justice system. Let's go into these places, where you either have colonial or pre-modern systems of justice, and bring to bear what we've learned about due process.' No, that part was skipped."

Over the years, Western governments have been criticized for working with foreign police who have proved abusive or corrupt. In 1973 and 1974, following revelations that American-backed security forces had committed atrocities in countries such as South Vietnam, Brazil, and Uruguay, Congress voted to prohibit the U.S. Agency for International Development from assisting foreign police or prisons. Today, the agency spends less than one per cent of its budget-some thirty million dollars-on rule-of-law programs, and most of this goes toward training. Although the State Department and Defense Department also fund police training, they generally do so to help advance U.S. strategic aims, such as combatting drug trafficking and terrorism.

Countries emerging from conflict often command headlines, congressional interest, and rule-of-law funding: Bosnia and Sierra Leone in the nineties, Iraq and Afghanistan today. Chronically flawed justice systems, like the one in Kenya, tend to get far less support. Haugen is incredulous: "Without investing in the rule of law for the poor, none of the other investments we make will be sustainable."

In 2007, Transparency International published a report underscoring the extent of the problem. Seventy-nine per cent of people surveyed in Cameroon, and seventy-two per cent of Cambodians, reported paying a bribe to obtain basic services in the previous year. The study also confirmed Haugen's view that the poor are more likely to pay bribes than the wealthy, often to avoid harassment. According to a report published by Afrobarometer, a public-opinion research group, only fifty-three per cent of people surveyed in subSaharan Africa expressed confidence that senior government officials would be brought to justice if they committed a serious crime. In Kenya, sixty-four per cent deemed most or all of the police corrupt. A World Bank study of twenty-three countries found that the poor saw police "not as a source of help and security, but rather of harm, risk, and impoverishment."

Many of the systemic flaws are due less to corruption than to judicial overload. According to the U.N.D.P. report, India has eleven judges for every million people, and more than twenty million legal cases pending. (The International Centre for Prison Studies found that nearly seventy per cent of the detainees in Indian prisons have never been convicted of any crime.) Some Indian civil cases take more than twenty years to reach court.

In the West, the cause of public justice suffers from what Haugen calls a "constituency gap." Liberal activists who have promoted the rights of the poor often feel ambivalent about police, prosecutors, and jail wardens, who have long been agents of oppression. Conservatives, meanwhile, have traditionally been skeptical about providing assistance to foreign governments, unless America's vital interests are at stake. And Westerners across the political spectrum have only a vague sense of the breakdown of legal systems in poor countries-as Haugen puts it, the rule of law is "the invisible oxygen we breathe at home." He says, "The people who care about injustice don't tend to spend a lot of time in courtrooms or police stations. We tend to use words like 'corrupt' and give up on these places."

In the Nairobi courtroom, Rogo stood up and answered the magistrate's questions, then made his arguments. "The police submitted no evidence tying my client to the theft," he said. "And the Registry of Motor Vehicles records indicate that the complainant who accused Duncan of the crime does not even own the vehicle, as he claimed."

During a break in the proceedings, Rogo asked Haugen if he would like to speak with Mutungi. Haugen went up to the bench where the detainees were squeezed together. He spoke to Mutungi for a moment; then the men clasped hands, knelt, and prayed for several minutes. When Haugen returned to his seat, he told me, "We prayed to God for Duncan's freedom. Prayers help. Prayers and a lawyer help more."

A week later, after fifteen months in jail, Mutungi was acquitted and set free.

Because of his religious fervor and his eagerness to intervene in other countries, Haugen bears a superficial resemblance to another American: George W. Bush. In other ways, too, Haugen fits the stereotype of a Christian conservative. A former high-school football player with a crewcut, he has coached peewee football and taught Sunday school, and says "Golly" with unnerving frequency. I have never heard him use profanity. (He says that he has done so in the past, but such moments tended "to involve hammers.") When I accompanied him on trips to Kenya, Cambodia, the Philippines, and India, he wore short-sleeved white oxford shirts, khakis, and Docksides. I asked him if he ever changed his wardrobe. He said, "When it's cold, I wear long sleeves."

His office, in Crystal City, Virginia, resembles the corporate law firms across the Potomac: marble desks, dark wood, and a willed air of humorlessness which, he says, "is intended to ooze 'serious.' " Few law firms, however, begin each workday by assembling for thirty minutes of silence and "prayerful preparation." Employees who arrive at the office between eight-thirty and nine o'clock find the door locked, and a sign suggesting that they go get a cup of coffee. (Another prayer session is held at eleven.)

But Haugen is not that easy to pigeonhole. He is fiercely critical of Christians whose moral rhetoric is not backed up with action. He does not speak a foreign language, but he is proud that ninety per cent of the mission's international staff are nationals of the countries where they work. And though he insists that the mission hire only Christian lawyers, investigators, and administrators-the group's Web site asks job applicants to include "a statement of faith," in which they describe their "spiritual disciplines" and their place of worship-the mission takes cases without inquiring about the creed of the potential client.

Haugen has great respect for activists at advocacy organizations like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, but he prefers to recruit government prosecutors, defense lawyers, and corporate lawyers who have extensive casework experience. "The circumstances afford no generosity for those who bring only good intentions, the best of motives or the most tender of hearts," he has argued. "Without a fierce commitment to the sharpest standards in operational and tactical excellence, we do not honor God."

Though Haugen acknowledges that police in poor countries are often purveyors of terror and injustice against the poor, he concluded early on that his organization would have to collaborate with the police in order to punish criminals. This, along with the mission's support for police raids on brothels, has proved controversial in the human-rights community. Haugen knows that the failed policies of President Bush make it harder for the International Justice Mission to get a hearing. He explained that many make assumptions about "people like us"-"Americans who intervene in other countries, law-enforcement types, Christians. Obviously, after the past eight years, people have negative associations with Americans talking about morality abroad." He went on, "Others might associate Christianity with the religious right and a political agenda as it relates to sex. . . . If there's a missionary picture of us, too, there are a lot of people with negative views of missionaries. That's a lot to carry." Nonetheless, he said, "Our basic attitude is let's just get on with the work of offering poor clients the highest-quality legal representation."

Haugen has slowly made inroads with the political mainstream: World Bank economists recently asked him for advice, and he has testified before Congress a half-dozen times. Later this month, he will speak at the World Economic Forum, in Davos, Switzerland. And Haugen has earned the admiration of Larry Cox, the executive director of Amnesty International U.S.A. Cox worked previously at the Ford Foundation, where he helped arrange one of the mission's first large grants. He applauds Haugen's focus on helping individual clients, saying, "He will not sacrifice individuals to make a larger point or to earn political favor."

But Haugen's core support comes from the Christian community. In 2004, he spoke to twenty thousand people gathered at Saddleback Church, in southern California, which is run by Rick Warren, the author of the best-seller "The Purpose-Driven Life," who will speak at President-elect Barack Obama's Inauguration. Last August, Haugen gave a talk at the Willow Creek Leadership Summit, an annual religious conference, before sixty thousand people. Largely owing to support from Christians, the organization's budget has grown rapidly, from two hundred thousand dollars in 1997 to twenty-two million in 2008. As a result, the mission's lawyers, investigators, and social workers have provided legal assistance to nearly fifteen thousand people.

Haugen grew up in Sacramento, the youngest of six children. His parents were high-school sweethearts: his mother, one of twelve children, was a devout Baptist who voted Republican; his father, a physician, was an atheist and a Democrat. "They cancelled each other out at the polls," Haugen said. He believes that there was an "authenticity" to his father's rejection of religion. "I don't think he was ever introduced to an intellectually credible presentation of the Christian faith," he noted. "He saw religion as a crutch." But his father never questioned his son's early embrace of Christianity.

Haugen had wanted to be a lawyer ever since elementary school, where he read about Abraham Lincoln's emancipation of the slaves. As a fifth grader, he became fascinated by the civil-rights movement after reading a Reader's Digest biography of Martin Luther King, Jr. In 1981, he started at Harvard, and began deepening his faith by questioning it. He and a half-dozen classmates formed a reading group in which they considered the secular critiques offered by thinkers such as Nietzsche and Durkheim. The more he studied alternative approaches, the more convinced he was that Christianity offered the clearest guidance for living life justly.

In 1985, after graduating, he travelled to South Africa. He served as an intern for Michael Cassidy, who, along with Desmond Tutu, ran the National Initiative for Reconciliation, a church-based effort aimed at ending apartheid. Three days after Haugen arrived in a black township, the South African regime declared martial law. He saw priests locked up, blacks beaten. Security forces detained him for attending a multiracial church service without permission. "What struck me was that in a country just utterly caged by fear-where whites were terrified, blacks were terrified, where anybody who tried to do the right thing was going to get crushed-I got to be with these Christians who had the most surprising absence of fear. They just did the right thing." He went on, "I came to believe that they lived that way because they actually believed that what Jesus said was true. And I found that, to the extent that I acted as if I believed what Jesus said was true, I lived without fear."

He returned to the United States in 1986, deferred an acceptance to the University of Chicago Law School, and began working on a book called "The Nations Christians Killed," which would describe the role that Christian churches had played in subjugating blacks in South Africa. An evangelical publishing company planned to bring out the book, which received significant advance publicity at an annual Christian book fair. Not long after, however, the publisher dropped the book. "I blamed myself," Haugen recalls. "Maybe I got too puffed up or too proud, and that was God's way of bringing me back."

In 1988, he started law school. During the summer break, the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights sent him to the Philippines to conduct his first human-rights investigation. In 1986, Corazón Aquino had unseated the dictator Ferdinand Marcos, but her government was failing to prosecute police or military officials for massacres carried out during the ongoing conflict with Communist rebels. Haugen focussed on the Lupao massacre of 1987, in which soldiers in the Filipino Army had rounded up and shot civilians who were hiding in rice paddies, killing seventeen. He travelled to Lupao and interviewed survivors. Two years later, the Lawyers Committee issued a report, written principally by Haugen, documenting such abuses and the Manila authorities' insufficient efforts to prosecute them. The Filipino government did not pursue those implicated in the report. "These people had opened up to me, and yet they were no closer to achieving real justice," Haugen said.

After law school, he joined the Department of Justice, as a trial attorney in the civil-rights division. He married Jan Larsen, a staff assistant at a law firm. (They now have four children.) In 1994, Haugen took a short leave to direct the United Nations' investigation of genocide in Rwanda, gathering the preliminary evidence needed in order to set up a war-crimes tribunal. In Rwanda, a predominantly Catholic country, the first visits he made were to pastors and missionary doctors, as he felt that he could quickly establish trust with them. He believed that the Christian network was an untapped resource in the human-rights world, even as he saw how badly some Rwandan clergy had failed their people. He was sickened to come across charred piles of bodies in a church where Tutsi had expected to find sanctuary. He took down the testimony of a father who saw his three small children hacked to death with machetes. At one massacre site, Haugen rolled back the decaying body of a woman and found the corpse of her child beneath her.

Six weeks later, after returning home, Haugen felt disoriented. In church, his mind drifted into calculations of how long it would take a machete-wielding gang to wipe out the congregation. Although the Salvation Army, World Vision, and other Christian organizations fed the hungry and sheltered the homeless, no Christian organization that he knew of had heeded the Bible's appeals for justice ("Break the arm of the wicked and evil man; call him to account for his wickedness that would not be found out"). He resolved that Christians serving God had to do more than pray for the victims of cruelty; they had to use the law to help rescue them. "This is not a God who offers sympathy, best wishes," he later wrote. "This is a God who wants evildoers brought to account and vulnerable people protected-here and now."

Haugen decided to form an independent justice agency, and his original mission statement laid out the four functions that drive the organization today: victim relief, perpetrator accountability, victim "aftercare," and structural prevention of violence. He wanted the organization to be explicitly Christian, because the ministries and relief groups in poor areas would be quicker to trust and refer cases to a Christian group; it could mobilize a grassroots constituency of American Christians; and, as he saw it, the prayers offered by the church community had proved to "make a difference in human history." But he stressed that the mission did not need to maintain a public Christian identity in places where that would impede its performance.

Haugen left the Department of Justice on a Friday and launched the mission the following Monday, in an office park in northern Virginia. He hired an administrator who had been a member of a church youth group that his wife had helped run, and secured desks for two interns.

In search of his first overseas clients, Haugen flew to Manila. Social workers and advocates described rampant abuse, but none expressed the desire to hand the cases over to an American who had parachuted in. On his way to the airport, feeling dejected, he visited a home for abused and abandoned girls, supported by the Christian and Missionary Alliance. The women who ran the facility told him about a twelve-year-old girl who had been raped the previous year and had subsequently given birth to a daughter. The girl had reported the crime, and a judge had ordered an arrest warrant. However, the police had not taken the suspect into custody, perhaps because he was thought to be the son-in-law of a police officer. Haugen offered his help, and the social workers accepted, supplying him with a copy of the warrant and a photo of the suspect. He had his first case.

Back in Virginia, Haugen scanned the rape suspect's photo and designed a wanted poster. He then sent a formal letter to the chief of the Philippine National Police, as well as to the judge who had ordered the suspect's arrest. Haugen avoided accusation. He recalls, "My tone was 'I'm sure you are not aware of this, but . . . ' " A few days later, Haugen received a fax of a page from a Manila newspaper with the headline "INTERNATIONAL LETTER LEADS TO ARREST OF RAPE SUSPECT."

As Haugen built his organization, he finished writing another book, "Good News About Injustice," which was issued in 1999 by InterVarsity Press, a Christian publishing house. It has sold nearly ninety thousand copies in English, and has been translated into French, Spanish, and Mandarin. Haugen appealed to Christians to answer God's summons to prevent injustice, which he defined as "the strong using force and deceit to take from the weak." In the book, Haugen casts himself as one who too frequently overlooks the needs of strangers. "I can move from torture on the evening news to touchdowns on Monday Night Football with almost the same mental and emotional ease as my channel changer," he writes.

The book also reads as a prosecutor's brief. Accounts of violent crimes against the poor are followed by quotes from the Bible demanding that Christians respond to injustice. Haugen presents a list of tangible ways that Christians can take action: praying for individuals enslaved, trafficked, or imprisoned; volunteering their own professional legal services; making personal appeals to government or corporate officials; donating to the mission. Haugen includes examples of people of faith who, in the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, combatted human trafficking, child labor, and lynchings. Noticeably absent from his account are similar tales of modern-day evangelicals.

When he started out, Haugen assumed that the mission's defense lawyers and advocates would help their clients work within local justice frameworks. However, as the mission expanded its reach-establishing its first permanent field offices in Thailand and India-he saw that his organization would also have to address the fact that courtrooms were crumbling, magistrates didn't show up for work, police were agents of abuse, and clients fundamentally distrusted legal authorities. The poor didn't just need lawyers; they needed new legal systems.

Each year, in its fourteen field offices around the world, the legal teams of the International Justice Mission take on a wide range of poor clients. Yet Haugen's group has become best known as an organization that partners with police to raid brothels and rescue trafficking victims. The mission has carried out its most controversial brothel raids in Thailand and Cambodia.

I visited Cambodia with Haugen in June, 2007. We met for dinner in the lobby of a hotel in Phnom Penh and chatted for several minutes before I noticed that his eyes were red. "Do you have allergies?" I asked. "No," he said. He cupped his face in his thick hands and began weeping. He had just reread the files on some girls who had been trafficked.

The next morning, Haugen and his team visited a facility called the Agape Shelter. Dozens of girls-many as young as six, none older than sixteen-rushed out of the cafeteria and greeted Haugen by bowing, their palms pressed together. He clumsily responded in kind. The girls squealed with laughter at his greeting, and he feigned being upset, causing them to giggle even more. Not all of the mission's aftercare partners are run by Christians, but this one was, which meant that the girls were encouraged to take part in Bible study. Haugen was asked to lead the group in prayer before a meal.

The girls were slender, and half of them barely came up to Haugen's waist. Scanning the room, he said to himself, "There are just so many."

Most of the girls were dressed in jeans, skirts, or sweatpants, but one of the smallest girls-she could not have weighed more than sixty pounds-marched toward me in bright-orange Teddy-bear-print pajamas. Eleven years old, the girl, whom I'll call Suzie, was carrying a soccer ball under her arm. She wrapped her other arm around my waist and let go only to give another girl-her sister, I later learned-a chance to do the same.

Sharon Cohn, the organization's senior vice-president for justice operations, told me that when Suzie was ten years old her mother had arranged for her and her younger sister, whom I'll call Linda, to live with a fifty-three-year-old American, Michael Joseph Pepe, who, over a period of months, sexually assaulted the sisters and five other girls in his home in Cambodia. The mission worked with the Cambodian police and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to help secure Pepe's arrest, in 2006. Pepe was deported to the United States and convicted last May on seven felony counts; his sentencing is expected in March. Under a law that makes sexual offenses against children abroad by Americans punishable in the United States, he faces up to two hundred and ten years in prison.

As I spoke with Cohn, the girls summoned Haugen outside for an impromptu soccer match. Suzie soon pulled me into a room filled with toys, steering me toward a stack of "Happy Happy Stickers"-peel-off images of corsets, scarves, silk blouses, billowy skirts, and glittery evening gowns, which could be mixed and matched to "dress" a cartoon drawing of a blond woman. None of the packets of stickers, which had probably been donated by American or European friends of the shelter, had been opened; the girls seemed content to admire them in their pristine form. Suzie asked me which dress I preferred, and I picked a long evening dress. She shook her head, and said, "This is better," pointing to black lingerie and leather boots.

A Cambodian court had just acquitted Suzie's mother on charges of having sold the sexual services of her daughters to Pepe. The mission thought that the mother must have known about the abuse, but, as a staff member at the shelter told me, "Cambodian judges are having a really hard time accepting the idea that a mother would sell her own children." The prosecutor's case was weakened by the fact that Suzie and Linda refused to testify against their mother. Linda had told the social worker, "Even if she sold us, she only did so because she was so poor."

Upstairs, Suzie showed me a small stuffed-animal collection. I asked her the name of a worn hound dog with droopy ears. She shrugged, looked up in the air for a few seconds, as if to ponder the question, and then said, "His name is Gary." She grabbed my hand, and we set off to share the news with Haugen. As we left the bedroom, a group of Suzie's friends descended upon us. I leaned over to talk to one of them, and an older girl, a thirteen-year-old, reached over and attempted to fasten the top button of my blouse. "Better closed," she said.

The mission's best-known raids occurred in 2002 and 2003 in Svay Pak, a village seven miles north of Phnom Penh. On two previous occasions, Haugen's group had submitted to Cambodian officials video evidence and testimony suggesting that young girls were being sold there, but the police had failed to respond. Haugen's organization did not then have a permanent base in Cambodia, but sent investigators to Svay Pak on short field assignments, in order to build a case so compelling that the Cambodian authorities would take action.

In May, 2002, a mission investigator infiltrated several of Svay Pak's brothels. He shot undercover footage of the prostitutes, most of whom were Vietnamese; in one sequence, a five-year-old girl was perched on the hip of another girl, who pushed her forward for sale. The investigator was permitted to take four girls under fourteen off the brothel's premises, to his hotel room. When the group arrived at the hotel, Sharon Cohn, the lead lawyer on the investigation, told the girls that they were going to a safe place. The mission submitted an evidentiary report to the Cambodian police, who, a week later, conducted a raid on three brothels, rescuing an additional fourteen underage girls.

The police initially dropped off the girls at a home run by social workers. About a week later, however, the police returned and arrested the girls, on immigration charges. Six girls were eventually convicted, sentenced to thirty days in jail, and prepared for deportation to Vietnam. Clearly, the mission could not rely on the police to act in the best interests of trafficking victims.

Haugen, with his emphasis on individual clients and single cases, could still count the operation a success. The organization's Christian ethos offered consolation: "Each little girl is made in the image of God," Haugen likes to say. "Each one rescued is a blessing." However, the results seemed less encouraging to a human-rights organization that the mission hired to review the evidence from one of its raids. Peter Sainsbury, who conducted the review, argues that the women and girls who remained in the brothels were left worse off by the raid. According to Sainsbury, the Svay Pak brothel owners, suspecting that health and social-service workers had tipped off the police, blocked the groups from providing care. (The mission contends that their attempt to independently verify this allegation turned up no evidence.)

When the mission's team returned to Cambodia, the following year, it assembled information on some forty underage girls who were being trafficked. Under the guise of planning a large sex party for a group of American visitors, the team members insisted on seeing younger girls. One pimp presented them with children between eight and ten.

Haugen invited NBC's "Dateline" to document the next phase of the investigation, believing that the Cambodian police would behave more professionally on camera. In fact, the police pledged full coöperation, assigning eighty officers to the raid and asking the mission to supply longer-term anti-trafficking training. Haugen flew to Cambodia two weeks before the police operation.

Haugen's field operatives had hoped that the ruse of the sex party would allow them to remove the girls from the brothel, thus minimizing the traumatic effects of the raid. But when the time came for them to take the girls away the pimps reneged on the deal. The mission alerted the police that there had been a hitch: the girls would be present for the raid. A short while later, armed police officers barged into the brothel, and mission operatives used batons and pepper spray to subdue the pimps, as "Dateline" cameras rolled. The girls fled or hid under beds. At the same time, police were raiding other sites in the village. According to Sainsbury, women not involved in trafficking were swept up, including a noodle seller who suffered a stroke in jail and died; in a hunt for gold, prison guards ripped out her teeth with pliers. (The mission acknowledged that the police, acting independently, might have arrested innocent people, but noted that its operatives had presented evidence to the police only about those who appeared in its investigative videotapes.)

Haugen, who had been praying at the safe house, got a call telling him that nine girls had been rescued at one brothel and twenty-eight at others. Among them was the five-year-old who had been pushed forward in the video, but for the most part these were not the same forty girls whose photocopied images Haugen had studied for weeks. The girls clutched each other as they walked barefoot into the safe house. This time, the mission had hired a doctor and local social workers to help the girls get settled.

The Cambodian police arrested thirteen Vietnamese suspects, charging them with human trafficking and conspiracy in the sex trade. In subsequent trials, Haugen's group presented evidence against four of the suspects, all of whom were convicted: two were sentenced to fifteen years, two to five years.

When "Dateline" aired its story, in January, 2004, its depiction of the mission's American lawyers and investigators liberating children from brothels won the organization thousands of new financial supporters. Among many in the human-rights community, however, the mission gained a reputation for cowboy behavior and media sensationalism. Haugen also stumbled into a wider debate over the legality of prostitution, which he would rather have avoided.

In 2000, Haugen testified before Congress in support of the Trafficking Victims Protection Act. When passed, the act withheld U.S. financial support from countries that failed to make "significant efforts" to prevent sex trafficking and forced prostitution. In 2003, when the measure was submitted for reauthorization, the act included a new provision calling for the suspension of aid to organizations that "promote, support, or advocate the legalization or practice of prostitution." The Bush Administration adamantly opposed not only trafficking but also the commercial sex industry, arguing that prostitution was "the oldest form of oppression." Although Haugen's group did not publicly support the new provision, it did not oppose it, either.

In the view of professional sex workers and some human-rights organizations, it is not prostitution itself that harms women but, rather, the refusal to treat prostitutes as legitimate workers, leading police to repress, extort, and assault them, and making it difficult for them to obtain health services. Sex workers in countries such as India and Thailand had begun to organize, gaining access to condoms, health services, literacy and vocational programs, and loans. In some cases, sex-worker unions had barred police from brothels.

Sex-worker advocates were aghast at the raids, and at Haugen's failure to reach out to them. Just as the advocates were starting to reduce the presence of police in red-light districts, a human-rights organization was bringing law enforcement back. These critics believed that the mission's raids gave police more opportunities to degrade women-by violating them, by rounding them up in the sweeps, or by deporting them. They also pointed to a number of women "rescued" by Haugen's group who had swiftly tried to return to the brothels.

Melissa Ditmore, a consultant to the Sex Worker Project at the Urban Justice Center, in New York, said of Haugen and his investigators, "When they storm into a brothel on a raid, and the police seize the sex workers, the women think they are being kidnapped and taken away by the police to be raped, which is what contact with the police usually means.* This is a form of terrorization."

In 2007, Françoise Girard, the director of the Open Society Institute's Public Health Program, in New York, met with mission officials to discuss the raids. Afterward, she asked Haugen to issue a statement saying that his group was working to combat trafficking but did not oppose prostitution more generally. He refused. Girard speculated to me that Haugen had resisted issuing a statement because he hadn't wanted to jeopardize the group's funding from the Bush Administration or the religious right. Haugen denies this. "We are not a statement-issuing organization," he told me, adding, "We have been trying so very hard to avoid getting caught up in the quite heated ideological debate about prostitution."

Haugen is far more eager to debate his human-rights colleagues on the question of engaging with the police. He recognizes the systemic nature of police corruption: in one city where the mission works, more than a third of its raids were sabotaged by the perpetrators' being tipped off, sometimes by the police. And the mission acknowledges that, during brothel raids, police officers are occasionally among those caught hiring teen-age girls as sex partners. Nonetheless, Haugen does not believe that giving up on the police is an option, unless one is prepared to give up on the rule of law altogether.

Ken Roth, the executive director of Human Rights Watch, who had served on Haugen's advisory board from the outset, resigned last year to protest the mission's raid-and-rescue tactics. "I didn't have confidence that the mission was actively seeking to mitigate the harms that have come from police actions," he told me. "The organization never consulted the advisory board about this, and when I complained they seemed unwilling to admit even the possibility that their approach could be improved."

The mission had issued a protocol for its foreign police partners, designed to minimize the adverse impact of anti-trafficking operations. The protocol calls for the police to protect the sex workers from the media, assure them that they are not the ones being arrested, and conduct enforcement operations in a manner that does not implicate organizations providing social services to sex workers. But Girard and others are unsatisfied. "What we're upset with is encouraging the police to use raids and rescues as a method," she said. "When you raid a brothel, you sweep up everyone, and then the mischief begins. Why would you do that, except that it looks good on TV?"

Holly Burkhalter, who became the mission's vice-president for government relations after spending two decades at Human Rights Watch and Physicians for Human Rights, said, "We are learning as we go. It is true that our first order of business is to rescue the little ones and punish their traffickers. But our goal is also to do no harm, and we have to take into account that the police are cruel and horrible to the sex workers. Having said that, I wish our critics would ask, 'What are the consequences of saying the police can never get involved when a brothel owner traffics an eleven-year-old?' Sex-worker unions aren't an alternative to the rule of law."

Haugen's critics repeatedly use the word "zealous" to describe the mission's work. A few call it "fundamentalist." Haugen knows that the mission's religious identity is discomfiting to non-Christians, but he says that he doesn't have the strength to do the work without a religious foundation. "I don't know how to do it another way," he told me.

His insistence on hiring only Christians can feel discriminatory. Aryeh Neier, a founder of Human Rights Watch and the current president of the Open Society Institute, criticizes the requirement. "If you are unwilling to have diversity in your own institution, you betray an unwillingness to allow diversity among those you are attempting to assist," he told me. "If it is objectionable to limit employment by reasons of race, I think it is comparably objectionable to limit by reason of religion. By all means, recruit Christians, but why exclude others?"

In a few countries, Haugen can't simultaneously stick to his insistence on Christian staff and his preference for handing over operations to national staff. In Cambodia, for example, only around two per cent of the population identify themselves as Christian, and the entire country has fewer than six hundred lawyers. It will be a long time before the mission field office is run by a Cambodian. At dinner after observing a day of training, I told Sharon Cohn that the mission's exclusion of non-Christian legal professionals would sometimes clash with its intention to strengthen the indigenous legal community. She acknowledged that sometimes there could be costs to relying on outsiders. "The contracted workers don't have that look in their eye that the national staff have," she said. "No matter how committed they are, they don't have the same investment. And, sure, we ask ourselves, 'If we were going for brain surgery, wouldn't we want the best brain surgeon, instead of the best Christian brain surgeon?' " But she stressed their exacting hiring standards, and said that she personally couldn't do the work she was doing without the daily prayers and Christian solidarity.

Non-Christians, Haugen told me, would find themselves out of place at the mission during prayer sessions. "If you don't share that faith, praying is a weird thing," he said. "It's a conversation with an invisible person who is not in the room." Even Christians who have come to the mission from more secular jobs find the adjustment difficult. Holly Burkhalter, the Human Rights Watch veteran, joined the International Justice Mission in 2006. Unaccustomed to proclaiming her faith publicly, she found the prayer sessions unnerving at first. She recalled, "It was one thing for us to pray for the client who had H.I.V., but another thing to pray for the person trying to find new office furniture. I thought God had better things to do than help us find office furniture. But I trusted that Gary knew what he was doing."

After dozens of conversations with Haugen, in which I puzzled over how he could exclude non-Christian legal professionals from such vital work, I finally realized that public justice systems weren't all he was trying to fix. He was also trying to reënergize the social conscience of Christians in the United States. "I saw my own faith community as spiritually impoverished," he told me. He felt that Christians had become so caught up with knowing God deeply that they were thinking too little about meeting the needs of their neighbors. "Jesus put these things together," Haugen told me. "That they were ever separated is absurd."

Haugen came of age at a time when the small group of Christians speaking most loudly for Jesus were not, in his view, representative of the wider Christian community. He told me, "Evangelicals come from a tradition that says, 'Don't be involved in politics. Try to go to Heaven.' But then we entered a phase where the religious right said, 'It's our duty as Christians to be involved in politics, and here's what Christians should be politically involved in fighting: abortion, gay rights, Communism.' Now, today's Christians are saying, 'Whoa, who says?' and 'Surely there is more.' " At his Willow Creek lecture in August, Haugen never mentioned James Dobson, Pat Robertson, or other leaders of the religious right by name, but he called on the crowd to join with him in leading "our faith community out of a prison of triviality and fear." He continued, "May this be the generation of Christian leaders that resets the bar of excellence."

Haugen's Christian audiences seem to respond to his challenge. I have attended several of the organization's fund-raisers, and its appeals for money are the most direct I have ever heard. In December, at a fund-raising dinner at a hotel in Washington, D.C., twelve hundred people watched a video that told tales of girls' coercion into sexual slavery, followed by accounts of their liberation and redemption. At the end of the night, the mission's development officer announced, "There are envelopes at your table. . . . A mere two hundred and fifty dollars will pay for the first six critical days of aftercare. . . . Some of you may be interested in giving a gift of stock or property. In this economy, where the stock market has been up and down, the work of I.J.M. might be your best bet for a high return. As you give, we have some music for you to give by." The Christian-influenced band Ten Shekel Shirt then played a closing song. The dinner raised a half-million dollars.

This past summer, I travelled with Haugen to Chennai, India, and observed the organization's efforts to get the police and the courts to enforce the country's prohibition on "bonded labor." Although this form of slavery was banned in India in 1976, it remains a shockingly common practice. Rice mills, cotton and garment factories, brick kilns, and cigarette factories are among the places staffed by slaves.

Many hoped that the economic booms in China and India would produce "trickle-down justice" for the poor. In theory, a new generation of business owners would demand that courtrooms be built, lawyers and judges trained, and corruption rooted out. Instead, Haugen told me, people with means have devised "workarounds" that bypass the public justice system. Businessmen hire private security firms in order to avoid dealing with the local police. And they turn to arbitration or private dispute-resolution mechanisms instead of the ineffective public courts. As a result, economic development has far outpaced legal justice.

At a ramshackle school and boarding house outside Chennai, Haugen and I met Vijayan, a thirty-two-year-old who told me that he became a slave when he was seventeen. In 1993, he said, he had borrowed five hundred rupees-fifteen dollars-from a rice-mill owner who employed the young woman Vijayan intended to marry. The loan enabled him to pay for a small wedding. He began working at the mill; soon afterward, the owner informed Vijayan that he actually owed him twenty-five thousand rupees-seven hundred and fifty dollars. Still, Vijayan thought that he could pay back the loan, as the owner insisted that both he and his wife work without a single day off and allowed him only three hours' sleep a night. After a few months, he realized that the loan had been a ruse: he, his wife, and any children that they might have would be forced to work an average of eighteen hours a day every day for the rest of their lives. They would be fed porridge made with damaged rice that could not be sold in the market; their children would not be permitted to play or to attend school. By 2006, Vijayan's four-year-old daughter, Devi, was spending her days cleaning a cow shed, and his ten-year-old son, Kumar, was carrying husks or helping to spread rice to dry in the sun.

Vijayan and his family tried to escape, but the owner tracked them down and took them back to the mill. Although they were physically abused on their return-the owner's favorite instrument was a belt from the mill machinery-Vijayan said they came to view themselves as fortunate after another man who attempted to escape, Bonda, was placed in iron chains and kept in solitary confinement for a week. By the time he was released, he couldn't stand up, and blood oozed out of his ears.

Hours after Bonda's release, the Indian police stormed the mill, alongside Indian staffers from Haugen's group. They asked Vijayan and the other laborers whether they were being held against their will. During police raids to free slaves, the laborers are often too frightened of the owner to speak up-the mission has been involved in several cases in which only young children told the truth. But at this mill Bonda's injuries were a catalyst: thirty-nine people declared that they had been enslaved.

Later that day, the mission helped arrange for the government to issue each of the laborers a personal "release certificate," establishing that they were debt-free. The form, developed by Haugen's organization, was adopted by Indian authorities in 2005. The Indian government is also required to provide each freed slave with twenty thousand rupees in compensation. The mission helped the workers set up bank accounts and place their children in schools or shelters. This is Haugen's ultimate goal: to establish protocols of justice that can become official state practice.

Since 2003, the mission's office in Chennai, which now employs three social workers, five investigators, and six lawyers, has obtained twelve hundred release certificates from the authorities, and placed nearly twenty-five hundred freed slaves and family members in aftercare. The mission's commitment to Vijayan didn't end once he was freed; its lawyers waited at police stations for hours, trying-unsuccessfully-to get the Indian police to issue a warrant for the arrest of the rice-mill owner.

The Chennai team now has fiftysix bonded-labor cases active in the Indian courts, and it has won twelve convictions, though some of the sentences have been shockingly light. (One slaveowner spent only a day in jail.) More than ninety-four per cent of the bonded laborers helped by the mission's Chennai office have remained free. Yet Haugen does not overstate the achievement. Human-rights groups estimate that between twenty-five and sixty million Indians live in a condition of slavery, and he says that the number helped by his organization is a "drop in the bucket."

Haugen is moved by the gratitude of the individuals he encounters in the field, but he says that the mission cannot itself become a workaround that allows governments to shirk their responsibilities. One advantage of managing individual cases is that it allows the mission to identify the specific gaps in developing countries' legal systems. Others, however, will have to undertake the large-scale structural reforms. In Cambodia Haugen's group established a permanent presence five years ago, and since then it has offered anti-trafficking training to two hundred and fifty Cambodian police officers. Nevertheless, mission lawyers and trainers still encounter pervasive police corruption that their training sessions can't fix. They also learned that the monthly police salary in Cambodia was forty dollars. The mission could do little more than testify before Congress about the correlation between the police officers' low pay and their involvement in sex trafficking.

Haugen hopes that the mission's work can ultimately inspire demand for public justice, in the same way that, over the past decade, AIDS advocates incited demand for anti-retroviral medicines in sub-Saharan Africa. Only if governments feel pressure from the public will they allocate resources to law enforcement, and right now citizens are too pessimistic about their prospects to apply that pressure.

On our trip to Kenya, we visited a small village forty miles from Nairobi, where the mission had helped the police successfully prosecute the rape of a six-year-old girl, whom I'll call Geraldine. Mary and Charles, Geraldine's parents, hosted a small village gathering to celebrate the conviction, which came two years after the crime. Haugen was puzzled that cultural taboos didn't preclude such an event. Joe Kibugu, the Nairobi office director, told him, "Mary and Charles want to show their neighbors that it is the rapists who should be ashamed, and that they are proud of standing up for justice for their daughter."

As we entered the dusty village of huts, Mary and the other older women passed around refreshments. After Haugen thanked the parents for their welcome, the young girls, including Geraldine, performed a dance for the visitors. As the tempo picked up, the older women and the men joined in. The most flamboyant dancer was an elderly white-haired man, who circled the group and poked his cane toward the heavens in praise. After the dancing, the mission staff mingled with the villagers, and I asked Mary what the older man's relationship to Geraldine was. She said that she had never seen him before. I approached the man, who was sixty-seven years old. He said that he had spent two hours walking to the village that morning, because he had heard that they were celebrating the conviction of a child rapist, and that lawyers would be present. He pulled out a crumpled piece of paper with a girl's name scribbled on it. "My granddaughter, who is deaf and mute, was also raped, and I need help," he said.

Haugen's group has set an internal goal: by 2017, they want the United States government and multilateral organizations to designate at least a billion dollars annually for fixing justice systems in the developing world. And Haugen wants to make sure that, before these donors decide where to spend their money, they solicit the views of law-enforcement, corrections, and courtroom officials-as well as those individuals who have themselves passed through the justice system.

But, in order to realize his broader ambitions, Haugen will eventually have to widen his appeal. And that may require choosing between his two goals: reforming public justice systems and reforming American Christianity. When Haugen speaks to Christian audiences, he sometimes seems to be suggesting that only Christians have the fortitude to stand strong in the face of cruelty. In "Good News About Injustice," he writes with admiration of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the Protestant theologian whom the Nazis executed in 1945 for his involvement in the plot to assassinate Hitler. He notes that Bonhoeffer once wrote, "Who stands fast? Only the man whose final standard is not his reason, his principles, his conscience, his freedom or his virtue, but . . . the responsible man who tries to make his whole life an answer to the question and call of God."

To rally his core Christian constituency, Haugen also uses absolutist language that can cause secular audiences to squirm, especially after eight years of President Bush's moralistic rhetoric. At the December fund-raising dinner, for example, Haugen used the word "evil" twenty-six times. When he discussed slaveowners, traffickers, and other abusers, he declared, "There aren't actually two sides to every story. Sometimes there is just evil-plain, unvarnished, intentional evil."

Haugen knows that it is an awkward time to be an interventionist abroad-and an even worse time to sell a good-and-evil agenda at home. As he put it, "You do find a fatigue around the idea that good Americans can go abroad and help people as a consequence of the Iraq war. That Iraq looked like a disaster creates challenges, to say the least." He used to tell audiences the Parable of the Talents, in which the master berates the servant who buried his talent for fear that he would squander it. Haugen once cited the passage to urge Christians to harness the power they had at their disposal. He told them, "God is not happy if you are too scared to use your power for fear of screwing up." But in the past few years he has had to change scripts: "I can't really give that sermon the same way in the wake of Iraq." That said, Haugen believes that Americans are applying the "lessons of Iraq" too broadly; not all morally inspired action should be tainted by association with Bush's mistakes.

Haugen's apparent unwillingness to alienate supporters of President Bush, who are a key part of his fund-raising efforts at home, means that he rarely makes direct criticisms of the policies of the past eight years. In the December speech, for instance, he used only coded language to distance himself from the Bush Administration and signal his awareness of the risks of pursuing a "battle between good and evil." The language was so coded that I missed the allusion. When I asked him after the dinner how he could still talk in such starkly absolute terms, he looked puzzled. "But I warned them we all had to be on guard for fairy tales," he said. The next day, he e-mailed me the speech, in which he had indeed said, "We are so used to people trying to manipulate us with false black-and-white moral options that we can be forgiven for not rushing off to join another good-guys-versus-bad-guys fairy tale." Unfortunately, such oblique disclaimers are unlikely to reassure secular activists, on whom system-wide legal reform depends. Larry Cox, of Amnesty International U.S.A., cautioned, "The moralizing language works with Gary's crowd, but his reach will be limited by it."

Long after I left Kenya, I e-mailed Joe Kibugu to ask what had become of the old man who danced in celebration of the prospect of finding justice for his granddaughter. Kibugu wrote back that he had followed up with the man; however, the mission's preliminary investigation found that the authorities had not been willfully slow in prosecuting the case. With regret, Kibugu decided that the mission was too short-staffed to take on a case that wasn't a flagrant injustice. The old man would have to nudge the Kenyan government on his own.

END