cover image Stop the Traffik: People Shouldn’t Be Bought and Sold

Stop the Traffik: People Shouldn’t Be Bought and Sold

Steve Chalke, . . Lion, $16.95 (160pp) ISBN 978-0-7459-5360-1

Aside from emphasizing the obvious horrors of human trafficking, this book offers little useful information about its causes and consequences. Social activist Chalke (The Lost Message of Jesus ) spotlights mostly girls and women who were duped or forced into slavery and prostitution, depicting former slaves as anonymous victims of a shady power that the book makes only a marginal attempt to investigate. The anecdotes (relayed out of context) combined with the moody portraits of trafficked women feel bizarrely staged and off-putting. While this isn’t a book that gives the reader even a general understanding of the mechanisms of human trafficking, Chalke does offer familiar actions everyone can take to ensure they don’t contribute to the business—like buying fair-trade goods and organizing petitions and fund-raisers for groups that fight trafficking. Chalke wants to call ordinary readers to action, but the content of the book will resonate deepest with those already invested in grassroots groups that fight human trafficking. (May)