While the content of this book is both factual and confronting, it is not a slow read.

God in a Brothel – An Undercover Journey into Sex Trafficking and Rescue is well written. When I first picked it up, it held my attention until 2 in the morning.

It is the candid and often heartbreaking story of undercover investigator Daniel Walker’s experiences infiltrating the multi-billion-dollar global sex industry and the human slavery that supports it. As the title suggests, this book tells of combating human trafficking and prostitution and the rescue of women and children from the sex slave trade.

The events take place on a global scale in more than a dozen countries, predominantly in the developing world but also in western nations. Just as an undercover agent poses as a purchaser of drugs, so too the author posed as a tourist, pretending to purchase human flesh, within the insidious underbelly of the sex slave trade industry.

Born in New Zealand, Daniel Walker completed a master’s degreee in third world development in Philadelphia under the guidance and leadership of author and evangelist Tony Campolo, Ronald Sider and other Christian activists. He returned to New Zealand and joined the police, working for several years in the criminal investigation branch before joining an organisation based in New York that specialised in rescuing victims of injustice and oppression.

Daniel Walker’s courage, honesty and transparency take the reader directly into many dark places. In the course of his work he entered numerous bars and brothels to collect video evidence via a hidden camera. He would then pass the valuable incriminating evidence on so perpetrators could be prosecuted and girls and women rescued.

The book is well-balanced with chapters of real life experiences, interspersed with lists of facts.

The subject matter is handled with sensitivity, documenting first-hand accounts of a problem that society would rather not know about, a problem in which the most vulnerable are entrapped as slaves with no voice and virtually no escape.

In the author’s words, “Like the slave trading of previous generations, it requires the combined effort of everyone in our global community to end such pervasive evil.”

By Daniel Walker
Published by IVP Books
ISBN: 978-0-8308-3806-6

– Beth Subritzky