Speakers

Keynote Speaker:

Siddharth Kara - Fellow on Human Trafficking, Harvard, author of "Sex
Trafficking: Inside the Business of Modern Day Slavery"


Siddharth Kara is one of the world's foremost experts on human trafficking and modern-day slavery. He is the first Fellow on Human Trafficking with the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, and a founding member of Harvard’s Advisory Collective on Human Rights Kara’s book, Sex Trafficking: Inside the Business of Modern Slavery, is the first of three books providing his groundbreaking new approach to the subject of contemporary slavery. Kara first encountered the horrors of slavery in a Bosnian refugee camp in 1995. Subsequently, he traveled to eighteen countries across five continents to further investigate these crimes. During his journeys, he witnessed firsthand the sale of human beings into slavery, interviewed over four hundred slaves of all kinds, and confronted some of those who trafficked and exploited them. In his first book, Kara draws on his background in finance and law to provide the first ever business and economic analysis of contemporary slavery worldwide, focusing on its most profitable and barbaric form - sex trafficking. He shares the moving stories of its victims and reveals the shocking conditions of their exploitation. He describes the local factors and global economic forces that gave rise to sex trafficking and other 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. He then identifies the sectors of various slave industries that would be hardest hit by specifically designed interventions, and he recommends the legal, tactical, and policy measures that would target these vulnerable sectors and help abolish slavery, once and for all. Kara speaks and consults extensively on contemporary slavery and human rights around the world. He advises several governments on antislavery policy and law, as well as several private and non-governmental organizations, including the Clinton Global Initiative, Humanity United, Free the Slaves, and the American Himalaya Foundation. He serves on the committee founded by Kirk Douglas that is lobbying the US Congress to provide an official apology for pre-bellum slavery. In 2005, he testified as an expert on human trafficking before the US Congressional Human Rights Committee. In 2009, he was selected as a Fellow for the acclaimed TEDIndia conference. Kara is currently working on a documentary film on human trafficking as well as his second book, which provides an economic and strategic analysis to debt bondage and forced labor. Kara holds a Law degree from England, an MBA from Columbia University, and a BA in English and Philosophy from Duke University. Previously, he worked as an investment banker at Merrill, Lynch, then ran his own finance and M&A consulting firm.