The Water Keeper

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of sexual violence, child sexual abuse, child abuse, and physical abuse.

According to the state of Florida, human trafficking is “the recruitment, harboring, transportation, provision, or obtaining of a person for labor or services through the use of force, fraud, or coercion for the purpose of subjection to involuntary servitude, peonage, debt bondage, or slavery” (“Human Trafficking Overview.” Florida Courts). In addition to being reported in all 50 US states, 16,554 individual cases were reported to the National Human Trafficking Hotline in 2021 (“Is Human Trafficking Happening in the United States?” Our Rescue, 1 June 2023).

Understanding these facts highlights the danger of human trafficking, which is central to Martin’s novel. The protagonist, Murph, is in a years-long battle against human trafficking, finding new women and girls who have been kidnapped and sold into sexual enslavement. Murph likens human trafficking to historical race-based enslavement and records the names of those he has saved (or tried to save) on the walls of his church, which once stood as a stop on the Underground Railroad. The novel explores the impact of human trafficking on several girls, like