Customer Reviews

Sex Trafficking: Inside the Business of Modern Slavery

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2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

As a retired academic, I mostly read history and philosophy in my spare time. Upon a friend's suggestion, I have recently read Mr. Siddharth Kara's treatise "sex-trafficking inside the business of modern slavery." It constitutes a first-hand account of a little-noticed business of human bondage and pathos. The author exposed himself to personal danger in attempting interviews with scores of victims spanning the whole range of demographics.

This book deals with three aspects of this world-wide business: the exploitative traffickers, the wrenching servitude of the victims, and the economics of the trade.

The author presents convincing quantitative information to provide a rationale as to why the trafficking business is quite attractive to the brute; while it is useful for lawmakers and NGOs, the narrative is shocking to the public. The sheer volume of this sort of "slavery" is astounding, and the subhuman conditions these victims are forced to live in, is repelling. Reading through some of the situations was nauseating to say the least. In today's affluent world, it is abhorring that spots of utter poverty exist but go unnoticed. More repulsive and dehumanizing is the fact that, on occasion, a father is manipulated into selling his daughter into this servitude.

While contemporary society holds woman as equal to man, and given that Indian thought in particular considers woman as divine, the destitution of these exploited women renders this practice beyond the pale of repugnance. The enablers look like demons, incapable of the remotest human sensibilities; that they manage to go under radar is astounding.

In his rendition, Mr. Kara strikes the right balance between narrative and numbers; there is enough of the latter to portray a clear picture to the common reader and sufficient detail to enable the statistician to derive probabilities and significance. Mr. Kara is to be commended for this brave venture driven by his idealism.

Ram Gollamudi

This book has changed the way I look at the world. I had minimal knowledge of human sex trafficking prior to reading. To say it is a page turner sounds callous; however the personal vignettes tied with the history and financial analysis kept me wanting to know more. The author's passion for this cause is apparent through his heartfelt writing. Further, I don't know many people (myself included) who would stare down the devil and go into the precarious situations Mr. Kara has to collect his powerful research.

Siddharth Kara's "Sex Trafficking: Inside the Business of Modern Slavery" is a deeply insightful, analytical and profoundly intelligent work informed by the author's justifiably strong sense of outrage and desire for social justice. I found myself both incredibly angry and moved to tears by the stories told by the women and children Kara interviewed, while also being inspired by his hard-hitting and incisive proposals to more effectively cripple and ultimately abolish this body-and-soul destroying business and all other forms of contemporary slavery.

I do not presume to offer an assessment of the entire book, since my expertise for the past six years is specifically in counter-trafficking in Albania. I was interviewed by the author when he came through the country several years ago.

Trafficking of women and children is a reality in Albania. But there is little evidence that application of the traditional code called the Kanun is a driving cause. The chapter begins with "sworn virgins", and implies that this is evidence of gender bias that creates vulnerability of females in the rural north. The number of women who have assumed this identity has always been small. But it can be argued that those who do so are likely to be less vulnerable than other women because they assume the status of "honorary man" - able to own property and able to conduct business. Thus, they are able to become more active agents of their own economic destiny, and may be less driven to make dangerous choices that would enable a trafficker to lure them into exploitation.

Blood feuds are also a reality in this country. While those who's lives are devastated by the consequence of this application of traditional "law", they are also a minority - and not demonstrably more vulnerable to human trafficking than the rest of the country. This connection is promoted as an understandable, but sensationalizing, publicity technique by some activist organizations in the country to try to draw attention to their important purpose - trying to resolve existing blood feuds, decreasing the likelihood of new feuds, and finding viable solutions for those lives are torn asunder by these feuds. Their work is important and too be respected. But it is not central to combating human trafficking.

And the larger question lingers - how does the business of human trafficking function in this country? Little will really be known about this until investigation and prosecution of traffickers is more seriously pursued, and researchers conduct extensive interviews with those convicted of the crimes. We need information from the business people themselves, to fill in the information gaps in the data known through the experiences of the victims of these criminals.

Data extracted from over 100 cases of adolescent and adult females of trafficking assisted in NGO shelters Albania between August 2007 and July 2008 reveal that 1) these victims were generally recruited from their communities of origin; 2) they were entrapped primarily by men offering false romantic relationships; 3) they came from the moderately distressed, more urban, regions of the country; and 4) they are over 90% from the Albanian majority population.

Mr. Kara's small chapter on Albania offers an interesting travelogue, but it does not provide substantive information about the business of human trafficking in this country. I hope that this is an anomaly in an otherwise better researched publication. Perhaps other practitioners in "the field" will comment about the chapters on the countries where they work.

Those who are interested in more in depth and up-to-date information about human trafficking in Albania are encouraged to visit these websites:

On child trafficking:

All Together Against Child Trafficking (BKTF)
http://www.bktf-coalition.org/index2.html

Terre des hommes Albania
http://www.tdh.ch/website/tdhch.nsf/0/albaniaE

on human trafficking, especially adolescent and adult females:

The Albanian Initiative: Coordinated Action Against Human Trafficking
http://www.caaht.com/index.htm

Videos about the work of 7 NGOs in Albania preventing human trafficking and assisting its victims (including the Vatra Center in Vlora mentioned in Mr. Kara's book):
http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=B1714AE6352FBE00

This visceral tale of modern slavery and sex trafficking is not for the faint of heart. Part text book, part novel, the depth and detail of Kara's story brings readers face to face with the tragic reality of slavery's bitter existence. In his book, Kara traverses the globe and gives a first hand account of the reasons for, and the damage done by, slavery. Kara concludes the book with a comprehensive breakdown of how to end slavery. Want to find out what the greatest thinkers of our time are reading? Then pick up this book.

This isn't normally my type of "read" - mostly I read fiction - but I was encouraged to read Mr. Kara's book, and though extremely saddened and angered by it - the economic and gender injustice that rages in our world is incisively brought to light - I am exceedingly glad I did. I'm not an academic by any stretch, but there was information useful for me, an everyday average citizen with interest in helping right a wrong, this tragic wrong called sex slavery.

I admire the author mightily for his bravery and tenacity - his deep heart and probing mind. His writing is clear and honest and builds us a picture of the conditions of this trauma -- how they affect those involved...including himself....

Knowing what I know now, there is no going back -- only forward into a future where we change what must be changed!

Timely and shocking. This book is extremely well researched, and even put the author's life at risk in the process. Slavery is a rampant modern problem caused by misogyny and poverty, traditions and corruption. Buy this book and learn about what is really going on in the world today.

I found this book excellent in many respects. It is a fact that 6 of the 7 billion people of the world live a hand-to-mouth subsistence existence. His figures on human slavery...28 millions slaves of which 1.2 million are sex slaves is also tragic, especially the fact that their lives are so bleak and hopeless that slavery is almost an acceptable improvement to their lives. The meager portion which goes to their families can be the difference between survival and death. This portion is well documented and encompasses most third world economies.

He feels the major cause which exacerbated poverty and the difference between the haves and the have-nots of the world happened in 1990 with the fall of communism and the IMF imposing strict monetary requirements on the third world countries in order for them to borrow money. It is heroic speculation that a different set of economic policies would have prevented the increase in poverty and the desperation and ease of exploitation which accompanied it. There are no easy economic answers to how to create a vibrant economy from scratch and he offers blame without any basis for an improvement. In the 60s when I grew up, I learned that "the rich get richer and the poor get poorer". It was unfortunately true in all periods and not due to IMF policies over the last twenty years.

In my view, the enormous poverty in the world is exacerbated by exponential population growth. The world has perhaps resources for 5 billion people and when there are 7 billion people, this is an untenable situation. Mr. Kara's observations are those of a tourist. He visited these places many times but he has never lived abroad.

I have lived in Costa Rica for 7 months and currently have lived in The Philippines for three years. He does not discuss The Philippines in his book but it is slightly like Thailand. These is extreme poverty here...corruption...treating poor people like dirt...abysmal public education. The worst cause of poverty which is obvious to me is astronomical population growth from 46 million in 1990 to 95 million in 2010. There is no public education about family planning and the results are obvious. With a well targeted educational program, perhaps the current population would be a more manageable 70 million and there would be less human suffering. Corruption is rife in the third world whether in former soviet republics, or former US colonies like here. This comment is from someone who has lived in the third world, not a tourist.

I would point out one more thing on which I felt Mr. Kara lacked perspective. He made the following comment about what he viewed in Thailand. "Fifty-year-old white European men stroll hand in hand with teenage Thai girls..." In the first place, if the girls were out with men they were NOT slaves. In the second place, he has no idea if they are prostitutes, girlfriends or wives. I have no idea why he would even mention this observation in a book about sexual slavery.

I have been married two-and-a-half years. I am a sixty-year-old American, my wife is a twenty-one-year-old Filipino. We go out to eat often and if Mr. Kara had chanced to see us, it might have been us he was describing above. How could he possible infer that my wife is a slave or even a prostitute? In fact all he would have known for certain is that my wife is very attractive and even then he would not have noticed her inner beauty which greatly exceeds her physical appearance.

Sexual slavery is an abomination and I thank Mr. Kara for his extensive research to document this problem. However, he trivializes this when he groups this with legal prostitution and long-term monogamous relationships that have an apparent age difference.

"Sex Trafficking" is a thought-provoking and heart-touching looking into modern slavery. While the author mainly focused on forced prostitution, he also covered other types of forced labor and slavery. He included many stories of slaves and ex-slaves to give a face to slavery and to demonstrate the variety of ways women are enslaved. The author also gave detailed economic breakdowns of the profitability of forced labor and explained how these economics can be changed to make slavery economically less desirable.

Much of the book was written in an engaging, conversational style. The parts on economics did get a bit technical and dry, but his points were still very understandable.

I don't agree with everything the author said since his view of the world is different than mine. However, the reader can easily use the information he's gathered in this book to come to their own conclusions on how to fight modern slavery. The author does suggest several practical things an individual can do to help.

However, I doubt his proposed international slavery inspection force will work due to the clash of values that occurs any time many different cultures are brought together in one organization. I also found it a bit ironic that the author clearly thinks it was a bad idea for America to "force" it's style of capitalism on the rest of the world, yet he's suggesting we should essentially "force" our style of morality and justice on other countries in regards to slavery.

(If you're curious, I think America has some pretty good--though not perfect--systems of doing things. However, we often forget how long it took for those things to get to their current state and what cultural foundations we had first that made them work well. I think our main problem is that we get impatient and don't fully think out cultural differences before trying to export our ideas.)

This book gave insight into modern slavery. It also provided a good look into how different other cultures can be in how they treat women, view slavery, etc. I'd highly recommend this book to anyone desiring a stop to modern slavery, people interested in other cultures, and to all women (especially feminists).


Review also at Different Time, Different Place Book Reviews

I almost put this book down after the first chapter b/c it read like a dissertation and was really hard to make it through. however the next 7 chapters were completely great and i'm so glad I finished it. The subject matter is super difficult, but Kara's passion really helps to move the reader along through it. This is a must read if you are studying or working in anti-trafficking.