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Event Detail
Morningside Campus
International Affairs Building, Room 1134
The Southern Asian Institute (SAI) presents: "Global Sex Trafficking and the Business of Modern Slavery," with author Siddharth Kara.
Co-Sponsored by the Center for East European Studies and the Human Rights Program.
Every year, millions of women and children are abducted,
deceived, seduced, or sold into forced prostitution. Generating huge
profits for their exploiters, sex slaves form the backbone of one of
the world's most profitable illicit enterprises.
Siddharth Kara’s new book, Sex Trafficking: Inside the
Business of Modern Slavery investigates the mechanics of the global
sex trafficking business across four continents -- and its primary
sources of origin in South Asia, Eastern Europe, and East Asia—and
takes stock of its human toll.
Drawing on his background in finance and economics, Kara
provides a rare business analysis of sex trafficking, focusing on the
local drivers and global macroeconomic trends that gave rise to the
industry after the fall of the Berlin Wall. He quantifies the size,
growth, and profitability of sex trafficking and other forms of modern
slavery—metrics that have never been published before—and locates the
sectors that would be hardest hit by specifically designed
interventions and penalties.
Since first encountering the horrors of sexual slavery in a
Bosnian refugee camp in 1995, Kara has taken multiple research trips to
India, Nepal, Burma, Thailand, Vietnam, the United Kingdom, Italy, the
Netherlands, Albania, Moldova, Mexico, and the United States. He has
met hundreds of slaves, has witnessed the sale of numerous human beings
into slavery, and has confronted some of the criminals who have
exploited them.
Siddharth Kara is a former investment banker and business
executive with an MBA from Columbia. He set aside his corporate career
to pursue anti-slavery research, advocacy, and writing, and, more
recently, a law degree. He serves on the board of directors of Free the Slaves,
an organization dedicated to abolishing slavery worldwide. In 2005 he
was invited to testify on contemporary slavery to the US Congressional
Human Rights Committee.
