Siddharth Kara is an author and one of the world's foremost experts on modern day slavery and human trafficking. He is the first Fellow on Human Trafficking with the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. He is best known for his book, Inside the Business of Modern Slavery.
Kara was born in Knoxville, Tennessee, USA to an Indian father raised in South Africa and a Parsi (Persian) mother raised in India. He grew up between Memphis, Tennessee, where he attended private school, and Mumbai, India, where he spent his summers. Kara received a BA in English and Philosophy from Duke University (including one semester at Queen Mary College, University of London), as well as an MBA from Columbia University and a Law degree from the BPP Law School, London. Kara worked as an investment banker at Merrill Lynch in New York for several years, during which time he was involved in some of the firm's largest M&A and equity financing transactions. Subsequently, he co-founded a media technology company and set up his own finance and M&A firm in Los Angeles, working and consulting for several corporations and non-profit organizations.
While an undergraduate at Duke University, Kara co-founded the "Duke Refugee Action Project", to enable students to volunteer in Bosnian refugee camps in the former Yugoslavia. He and a few other students obtained a grant from the University, learned basic Bosnian, and procured placements from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees to volunteer at camps in the region. That summer, he lived as the refugees, in wretched conditions with barely enough food to eat. During this time he heard countless tales of brutish atrocities, including tales of Serbian soldiers who would raid Bosnian villages, execute the men, and round up the women and young girls and traffic them to brothels across Europe. This experience would prove to be a pivotal point in his life. Later, while a postgraduate at Columbia University, Kara continued to be haunted by the tales of sex trafficking from the refugee camp. He became increasingly aware of the need for a more analytical finance and economics approach to understanding this unconscionable crime and eradicating this highly profitable global business. That summer, he embarked on the first of several long self-funded journeys across the world to research human trafficking and other forms of contemporary slavery. After a few years working as an investment banker, he decided to leave investment banking, to allow him to continue his research and analysis of contemporary slavery. Later, while working and consulting in Los Angeles, he continued to make research trips around the world, and wrote a screenplay as well as his first non-fiction book based on his accumulating research. Subsequently, Kara obtained a law degree, all the while continuing to work, write, and travel extensively to advise on and advocate against modern day slavery.
In January 2009, Kara published his acclaimed non-fiction book, Inside the Business of Modern Slavery, published by Columbia University Press. In May 2010, a second edition was published in paperback. This is the first of three books that provide his pioneering approach to all forms of contemporary slavery. The books are a culmination of over ten years of self-funded research, during which time Kara traveled to eighteen countries across five continents to investigate these vicious crimes. During his travels, Kara witnessed firsthand the sale of human beings into slavery, interviewed over four hundred slaves of all kinds, and confronted some of the individuals who trafficked and exploited them.
His book, Sex Trafficking: Inside the Business of Modern Slavery has been recommended by the Under-Secretary-General of the United Nations and head of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. It has been lauded by academics, policy-makers and the press, with the Financial Times describing it as an "eloquent and campaigning book", and slavery experts heralding it as "groundbreaking" and the "best book yet on the enduring problem of modern-day slavery". The book has been selected as one of the three finalists for the 2010 Frederick Douglass Book Prize, which is awarded for the most outstanding nonfiction book published in English on the subject of slavery and/or abolition and antislavery movements.
In the book, Kara draws on his background in finance, economics and law to provide what is widely considered to be the first ever comprehensive business, economic and legal analysis of contemporary slavery worldwide, focusing on sex trafficking, its most profitable and barbaric form. He explores sex-trafficking across several regions of the world, providing the moving stories of its victims and revealing the shocking conditions of their exploitation. He describes the local factors and global economic forces that gave rise to the various forms of modern day slavery across the last two decades and quantifies, for the first time, the size, growth, and profitability of each slave industry. Finally, he recommends the legal, tactical, and policy measures that would target vulnerable sectors in these slave industries, and help to abolish slavery, once and for all. Kara is currently writing the second of his three books on contemporary slavery that focuses on bonded labor. While sex trafficking is the most profitable form of modern-day slavery, bonded labor is the most prevalent form.
Kara's award-winning screenplay, Trafficking, based on his research into sex trafficking worldwide, is currently being made into a film, directed by acclaimed actress and director Nandita Das, and produced by Kara, along with Luca Guadgnino (director of I Am Love starring Tilda Swinton) and Elizabeth Stanley. The screenplay won the 2003 CineStory Screenwriting Award, and was shortlisted for the Sundance Screenwriter’s Lab and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Nicholl Fellowship in Screenwriting.
Kara's unique journey across South Asia in the summer of 2010, to research for his second book on bonded labor, was covered on the CNN International primetime news program Connect the World with Becky Anderson. It is also the subject of his weekly blog on the program's website.
In 2009, Kara became the first Fellow on Human Trafficking with the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. He is also an Affiliate of Harvard's Human Rights and Social Movements program, as well as a founding member of their Advisory Collective and a member of their Working Group on Human Trafficking and Modern Day Slavery.
Kara speaks and consults extensively on contemporary slavery and human rights around the world. He advises several governments, as well as the United Nations, on antislavery policy and law. He also advises several international and non-governmental organizations, including the Clinton Global Initiative and Humanity United. He has spoken at numerous conferences and institutions and has been interviewed on over thirty radio and television shows in the US, Europe and India. Kara serves on the board of several antislavery organizations, and also serves on the committee founded by Kirk Douglas that is lobbying the US Congress to provide an official apology for pre-bellum slavery. He has testified several times in international forums as an expert on human trafficking, including in 2005, before the Congressional Human Rights Caucus of the United States Congress. In 2009, he was selected as a Fellow for the acclaimed TEDIndia conference.
