by Julia Shumway, Oregon Capital Chronicle
September 13, 2024
As he seeks to become Oregon’s first Republican attorney general in more than three decades, Will Lathrop has touted his five years leading an international charity’s efforts to eliminate slavery and human trafficking in Ghana.
It’s in his first campaign ad: “In Africa, I led multinational teams to rescue children from human trafficking and protect women from violence.”
In the state-issued voters’ pamphlet: “Will led large multinational teams in East and West Africa to protect women from violence, rescue child slaves and human trafficking victims and build up criminal justice systems.”
And in bold and underlined on his campaign website: “As a result of his team’s work in Ghana, there has been an estimated 36% reduction in the number of children used as slaves in the fishing industry in Ghana, an unprecedented accomplishment in just a five-year period.”
But a BBC documentary from 2023 tells a darker story: that a single-minded focus on setting and meeting targets resulted in Lathrop’s team working with police to effectively kidnap some children and take them from their families under false pretenses.
Lathrop disputes that and told the Capital Chronicle in an interview that the team he oversaw at the Washington D.C-based International Justice Mission felt pressure to save endangered children — not meet arbitrary targets.
“You felt that pressure every day because there were tens of thousands of cases. You might get to 100 a year, and you still had thousands and thousands and thousands left,” he said. “There was no amount of money, there was no amount of targets or objectives, whatever you call it, that was going to be any more motivating to myself and the people I worked with than pressure over human life.”
The International Justice Mission, a Washington D.C.-based nonprofit, has operations in Asia, Africa, Europe and South and Central America, focused on ending slavery and violence, especially against women. In Ghana, where Lathrop was based, the BBC World Service’s investigative branch spent months looking into tips that the organization failed to ensure the children it identified as trafficking victims were actually victims.
Reporter Kyenkyehene Boateng used interviews with more than a dozen people, reviews of internal WhatsApp messages and audio captured by an undercover journalist working in the International Justice Mission’s accounting department to make the 50-minute documentary, “The Night They Came For Our Children.”
“I’ve spent a year investigating a big charity that sets out to look after the vulnerable,” Boateng concluded in the film. “Driven by the need to meet targets, they appear to have lost their way. I believe I have seen innocent but poor families torn apart as a result. I can’t help wondering how many others are out there.”
Two cases
Lathrop was the International Justice Mission’s country director in Ghana from 2018 until 2023, shortly before returning to Oregon to run for attorney general. The documentary highlighted two cases during his tenure.
In September of 2022, armed Ghanaian police, following a tip from the International Justice Mission, arrived at the remote northern village of Mogyigna in the dead of night to take four children. In the documentary, a woman who described herself as the grandmother of the children said police held a gun to her throat. Other villagers described the night as traumatizing — children who remained in the village tried to hide when they heard cars, and the grandfather of the children taken by police later died, unable to see his grandchildren again.
The three girls and a boy taken that night ranged in age from 5 to 11. They were taken to a hotel, where they were bathed, fed and photographed, then taken to a shelter, where they ended up staying for four months, the documentary said.
International Justice Mission officials had determined before the raid that the three girls were not trafficked, and the boy might have been, according to texts featured in the documentary and a subsequent statement from the organization. Still, two of the children’s uncles were arrested and charged with child trafficking and child labor law violations, charges that were ultimately dropped.
Lathrop said he didn’t know much about the case, which occurred toward the end of his tenure, and questioned whether the story presented in the documentary was true. Many areas of Ghana are still controlled by the country’s slave master class, he said, and there’s an incentive to look the other way on child trafficking and slave labor.
Additionally, he said, it wasn’t uncommon for police following a trafficking-related tip from the International Justice Mission to take other children because of abuse, neglect or child labor violations.
In the other featured case, a boy and his sibling were taken from their mother in 2019. The sickly woman was accused of selling her son into slavery on a fishing boat and was sentenced to five years in prison — but her conviction was overturned after two years by the Sudreau Global Justice Institute, a partner of the International Justice Mission. It advertised her case in a fundraising campaign, saying she was falsely convicted of a serious crime.
Setting goals
Globally, the organization set a goal in 2019 of rescuing millions of children from slavery by 2030. In Ghana, Lathrop said he signed off on local goals, though employees at the nonprofit told the BBC’s undercover journalist that Lathrop set them himself.
“Such targets are all set from the top, and in the organization if a target should be set, it should come from Will,” an employee says on secretly-recorded video included in the documentary. “Then, based on that, all the departments, we are looking at rescuing this number of victims. This number of suspects should be arrested.”
And with a lot of money on the line – the nonprofit brought in more than $118 million in contributions in 2023 and spent nearly all of it – employees interviewed by the BBC’s undercover reporter said there was pressure to perform.
“We are committing resources, so we can’t commit a lot of resources for you to rescue just 10 children in the year,” an employee said. “So the targets will be set. You just have to push yourself and achieve them.”
Fail to meet those goals, an employee said in the documentary, and employees could miss out on raises or even lose their jobs.
Lathrop said goals were set at the beginning of the year by each team — the nonprofit had people working on teams dedicated to investigations, advocacy and social work, among others — and then reviewed by their supervisor and office director before he signed off on them.
Goals could include things like how many cases a team wanted to work with police to investigate or how many victims they wanted to work with social workers to find, he said. Lathrop said he didn’t recall ever increasing a target, and that there were times he lowered targets because of the available resources or other expected disruptions to work.
He said he was shocked by the report that employees thought they would lose their jobs if they didn’t meet targets.
“I can’t say for the whole organization, I can only talk about my time in Uganda and Ghana, but nobody was ever let go for not meeting their targets or sanctioned,” he said. “The people that ultimately left the organization, like most organizations, usually came down to behavior, like not coming to work, or fighting with coworkers, or things like that. It was never related to goals.”
One of the people who ultimately left the organization was Lathrop — who, in his words, worked himself out of a job. He said his main task in Ghana was to put together a functioning team, make relationships with the local government and raise up local leaders to take his place. A Ghanaian woman now leads the team he left.
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