Foolscap Tomes

I was just listening to Worldview, an NPR world news “magazine” produced by Chicago Public Radio. One of today’s articles was titled The Economics of Sex Slavery and was an interview with Siddharth Kara, a former investment banker who turned his business and financial expertise to researching the economics of the global sexual slavery industry. His goal was to define the extent of the industry through economic analysis and then to investigate methods of ending sexual slavery, again through economic means, as it is currently viewed as a vastly profitable and relatively low-risk criminal industry. He has now published a book titled Sex Trafficking: Inside the World of Modern Slavery.

The article was quite interesting, if somewhat sickening as it covered issues from children being sold into slavery by their families to Bosnian women and children being rounded up for sale by Serbian soldiers following the slaughter of the men of the villages. One statistic the author mentioned was that, by his conservative estimate, between 9%-12% of men worldwide will, knowingly or otherwise, use the services of a sex slave at some point in their lifetimes. He also had an anecdote of a woman in Amsterdam who was turned over to her enslavers by the police after she had sought shelter at the police station. Part of the point of this was that prostitution in Amsterdam is legal and commonly perceived by tourists as being safe and “guilt free” [read: stick with the gourmet weed].

Anyway, this shouldn’t be a shock to most of you, but give it a listen.