The Nonprofit That Fixes Broken Courts Instead of Handing Out Aid

In 1994, a young American lawyer named Gary Haugen was sent to Rwanda to lead the United Nations' investigation into a genocide that had killed hundreds of thousands of people. He spent his days counting bodies and cataloguing evidence. He came home with an uncomfortable conclusion: the poorest people on earth are not undone only by a lack of food, medicine, or money. They are undone by violence - and by the fact that, when the violence comes, no one is coming to protect them.

Three years later, in 1997, Haugen left the U.S. Department of Justice, where he had prosecuted crimes of police misconduct, and founded International Justice Mission. Nearly three decades on, IJM has become one of the largest human rights organizations in the world focused on a single, stubborn idea: that the answer to violence against the poor is not to route around broken justice systems, but to walk directly into them and make them work.

What it doesCasework, not just campaigns

Most anti-poverty and anti-trafficking work assumes a functioning state sits somewhere in the background - police who answer calls, prosecutors who file charges, courts that convict. In much of the developing world, that assumption is false. Police may be under-resourced, untrained, or themselves part of the abuse. IJM's model treats that failure as the core problem to solve.

The organization partners with local authorities to do four things in sequence: rescue victims of violence and trafficking, bring the perpetrators to justice through local courts, restore survivors through aftercare, and then strengthen the justice system itself so protection becomes routine rather than exceptional. IJM calls this its Community Protection Model.

Who it servesThe customer is a courtroom

IJM's ultimate beneficiaries are people in poverty who have been trafficked, enslaved, sexually exploited, or abused by those with power over them. In fiscal year 2025, the organization reported that its support helped free 13,557 children, women, and men from violence. Cumulatively, it says it has helped rescue or protect more than 76,000 people since 1997.

But its operational partners - the entities it works with day to day - are governments: police forces, prosecutors, and judiciaries across roughly 19 countries. Its financial base is a third group entirely: hundreds of thousands of individual donors, churches, foundations, and corporate partners who fund the work.

The problemViolence as an invisible plague

Haugen's central argument, laid out in his 2014 book The Locust Effect, co-written with Victor Boutros, is that everyday violence quietly undoes almost every other form of aid given to the poor. Build a school, and it means little if girls are trafficked on the way there. Fund a small business, and it collapses if a widow's land is seized with no court to stop it. He calls it the locust effect because, like a plague of locusts, it descends and destroys everything - largely unseen by the outside world.

The book won the 2016 Grawemeyer Award for Ideas Improving World Order, and Haugen's 2015 TED talk on the same theme has been viewed millions of times. The argument helped push violence and access to justice onto the global development agenda, including the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goal 16.2 on ending abuse, exploitation, and trafficking of children.

Products & servicesWhat is actually on the truck

IJM's caseload spans forced labor and bonded slavery, sex trafficking, online sexual exploitation of children, violence against women and children, police abuse of power, and property theft from vulnerable people such as widows. It was an early mover on livestreamed child sexual abuse, with significant work in the Philippines.

Its newest front is forced scamming: people trafficked into cyber-scam compounds across Southeast Asia and forced to run online fraud against victims elsewhere. IJM is one of the few organizations treating this as human trafficking rather than ordinary cybercrime, and in 2024 published research linking financial sextortion of American children to those same compounds.

Underneath the casework sits a less obvious product: data. IJM runs prevalence studies that measure how much violence exists before a program begins and again years later - effectively a clinical trial for justice. Victim case tracking and trafficking-pattern analysis run on tools including Salesforce and Tableau, which is why the organization sometimes reads more like a crime lab than a traditional charity.

The moneyA $130M nonprofit, in one chart

IJM operates on roughly $130M in annual support and revenue. The bulk of spending goes to program services, with the remainder split between fundraising and administration. Funding comes from individual donors and churches, large foundations, corporate partners, and government grants.

Foundation support has been catalytic. In 2006, a $5M grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation funded Project Lantern, a pilot in Cambodia designed to prove the model could be replicated. In 2011, a grant of roughly $9.8M from Google.org backed anti-slavery work, notably in India. Government partners have included the U.S. Department of Labor and the U.S. Department of State.

ExpertiseLawyers, cops, and social workers under one roof

The organization's staff of roughly 1,400 is an unusual mix. It hires lawyers and former prosecutors who understand how to build a case that will survive a local court. It hires investigators and people with law-enforcement backgrounds who can work alongside police. And it hires social workers and aftercare specialists trained in trauma, because a rescue that ends at the compound gate is not a rescue that lasts. Increasingly, it also hires data analysts and technologists, since much of the modern caseload - livestreamed abuse, sextortion, scam compounds - lives online and leaves a digital trail.

That blend is deliberate. Haugen's founding insight was that human rights work had plenty of advocates and reporters but few people who knew how to actually secure a conviction. IJM was built to close that gap - to put criminal-justice craft in service of the poor. The culture that grew around it is faith-based, measurement-obsessed, and, by the standards of the sector, notably long-tenured; field directors often spend a decade or more in a single country.

LatestThe scam-compound front

The most visible shift in IJM's work over the past two years has been its move into forced scamming. Across Myanmar, Cambodia, and Laos, criminal networks have trafficked people into fenced compounds and forced them to run romance and investment scams targeting victims around the world. IJM has treated this as trafficking from the start, supporting victim identification, casework, and perpetrator accountability, and in 2025 it worked with the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime on a regional awareness campaign. It is a reminder that modern slavery keeps changing shape - and that an organization built to chase brick kilns and brothels now has to chase server farms too.

The competitionA crowded field, a different lane

IJM operates alongside other well-known anti-trafficking and human rights organizations - Polaris Project, A21, Anti-Slavery International, Free the Slaves, The Freedom Fund, and the Human Trafficking Institute among them. Many run hotlines, shelters, awareness campaigns, or survivor services. IJM's distinguishing bet is upstream of all of that: rather than substitute for the justice system, it tries to repair it, then measure whether the repair reduced violence.

Where it fitsThe systems layer of human rights

If the anti-poverty world has a service layer - food, shelter, cash, education - IJM has planted itself at the systems layer, where laws either get enforced or don't. That position is unglamorous. It means years of training police who once looked away, and slow work inside courts that move at their own pace. It also means the organization can, at least in principle, hand a functioning system back to a government and move on.

Whether that model scales to the size of the problem is an open question, and IJM has faced scrutiny over how it operates in the field. But the core idea - that violence is a development problem, and that justice systems are the thing worth fixing - has moved from the fringe to the mainstream of how the world talks about poverty. That, as much as any single rescue, is what Gary Haugen set out to build.