Bruce Ladebu

Bruce Ladebu is an author, an adventurer, and the founder and director of the Children's Rescue Initiative, which rescues children and adults from labor slavery and human trafficking.

He grew up chasing adventure from the Great Lakes to the Canadian Arctic and built a reputation as a professional guide and explorer. In the early 1990s, a missionary trip through the former Soviet Union opened his eyes to child sex trafficking. A 2009 visit to Pakistan changed his life for good. Standing in a sweltering factory, he watched a mother sell her young son to the owner to feed her other children. That moment broke him and remade him.

He founded the Children's Rescue Initiative and has spent the years since leading covert teams into brick kilns, rope factories, and traffickers' safe houses across western Asia. As of 2025, more than 2,600 people have been liberated from the tyranny of enslavement through that work.

Bruce writes Christian-living and narrative nonfiction drawn from the same conviction that drives the rescues. His books include Out of the Slave Fields, the story of two decades on the anti-trafficking front lines, and three works of Christian living: The David Effect, The Shammah Code, and More Than Conquerors.

He continues to lead the Children's Rescue Initiative at thechildrensrescue.org.