Bwog’s Laura Mills sat in SIPA yesterday afternoon to hear about an under-reported scourge.

In the upper echelons of IAB on Monday, author Siddharth Kara began his talk about his new book, Sex Trafficking: Inside the Business of Modern Slavery, with a slideshow. 

Said slideshow was succinct; Kara lucidly outlined the factors that motivate the supply and demand sides of the sex trafficking industry, which now ranks only second to narcotics trafficking in terms of globally profitable illicit trade. He also highlighted the need to up the ante and punish the false advertising campaigns, the family members, the former slaves, the abducters, and all others who facilitated this virtually risk-free and incredibly profitable business, in which a slave bought for approximately $1,000 could yield up to 29 times that in returns.

In his travels Kara met all sorts of men and women who experienced the horrors of slavery, some of whom had been sold again and again as to traffickers by family members and former slaves. One slave told him her family treated her “like a slot machine,” and once, as he was leaving a child brothel, a desperate brothel madame offered him “two children for the price of one.” 

When an attendee asked Kara how he had gotten into the non-profit industry, he answered that he spent some of his undergraduate summers in refugee camps in the former Yugoslavia. He was halfway through earning his MBA when he changed his mind midstream and went into the non-profit sector. Words of inspiration for would-be Wall Streeters looking for post-graduation plans, perhaps?