Sex Trafficking: Inside The Business Of Modern Slavery

At the end of 2006, there were 28.4 million slaves in the world, 1.2 million of whom were women and children abducted, deceived, or sold into forced prostitution. Kara quantifies the growth and profitability of sex trafficking, shares the stories of victims, and reveals the shocking conditions of their exploitation.

At the end of 2006, there were 28.4 million slaves in the world, 1.2 million of whom were women and children abducted, deceived, seduced, or sold into forced prostitution. These individuals are physically and psychologically tortured and made to service hundreds if not thousands of men. Generating huge profits for their exploiters, sex slaves form the backbone of one of the world's most profitable illicit enterprises, for unlike narcotics, which must be grown, harvested, refined, and packaged, the female body requires no such "processing" and can be repeatedly consumed.

Siddharth Kara first encountered the horrors of sexual slavery in a Bosnian refugee camp in 1995. Since then, he has traveled to India, Nepal, Burma, Thailand, Vietnam, the United Kingdom, Italy, the Netherlands, Albania, Moldova, Mexico, and the United States to learn the mechanics of this brutal business and to take stock of its devastating human toll. This book 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. Kara quantifies the size, growth, and profitability of sex trafficking and other forms of modern slavery-metrics that have not been published before-and locates the sectors that would be hardest hit by specifically designed interventions and penalties. Kara bolsters his analysis with a riveting account of this unconscionable industry, sharing the stories of victims and revealing the shocking conditions of their exploitation. He concludes with a plan for aggressive measures that would sharply increase the costs of exploiting sex slaves, thereby reducing their aggregate demandamong slave owners and consumers.