After a recent panel discussion in West Hollywood relating to human trafficking, I was approached by two individuals from the Takepart.com team, Rick Reisdorf and Wendy Cohen. They asked if I would be interested in contributing to the slavery portion of their soon-to-be launched website. I was pleased that we saw eye-to-eye on several crucial imperatives regarding the site’s role - primarily to serve as a destination for reliable data and information, while providing tools and recommendations that would allow the very fragmented abolitionist community to unify around a set of activities to initiate a more effective response to this unconscionable human rights violation. As a subset of slavery, we agreed to start our focus on trafficked sex slaves. Such slaves are by far and away the most profitable slaves in the world, and it can be argued, the most barbarically exploited.

Contemporary slavery is thriving as a global business, yet efforts to intervene in these crimes remain anemic, misdirected, and uncoordinated internationally. Beginning a decade ago, the first stage of the contemporary abolitionist movement was to remind people that slavery still existed and that slave-trading (also known by the less helpful term, “human trafficking”) had resurfaced as a ubiquitous mode of entry into numerous forms of slave exploitation, especially for forced prostitution. However, awareness and outrage are not enough. We must shed the propensity for sensationalism and initiate a more effective, analysis-driven response based on a granular understanding of the business of all forms of contemporary slavery, and none is a more sophisticated than the business of sex trafficking.

Even though approximately four percent of today’s 29 million slaves are trafficked sex slaves, those same slaves generate almost 40 percent of the $91.2 billion (yes, that billion, with a “b”) in profits enjoyed by slave owners worldwide. At present, sex trafficking is a tremendously profitable, low-risk enterprise, at least for those who lack any measure of moral sensibility. In the absence of an accurate understanding of the size, profitability, and growth rate of sex trafficking, the measures, policies, and laws intended to thwart this grotesque practice have been largely misaligned with the nature and extent of the crime. Here are a few key data points - there are more than 1.2 million trafficked sex slaves in the world (size), generating a global weighted average $29,210 in profits per slave per year at net profit margins of 65 -75 percent (profitability), with a global growth rate of 3.6 percent (growth). Consider that the global weighted average purchase price of a trafficked sex slave is $1,900, and you can see that the return on investment is staggering.

Understanding the business model of this globalized crime reveals specific points of intervention that are vulnerable to exploitation by more targeted abolitionist measures. Such measures must be undertaken by a new brand of global abolitionist movement with sufficient unity, expertise, resources, and trans-national cooperation to wage a more effective battle against sex trafficking and all other forms of slavery. Stakeholders at all levels have crucial steps to take, be they governments, international organizations, NGO’s, local communities, and individual citizens.

In an ongoing series of blogs, I will outline these steps while providing detailed information on why the business of contemporary slavery has ascended in the post-Cold War era and the best ways we can abolish each mode of slavery, starting with sex trafficking. For those wondering - how can we succeed in the face of such tremendous forces as poverty, lawlessness, corruption, and acute biases against gender and ethnicity that drive the supply-side of contemporary slavery, I offer you two points of hope.

First, we do not have to ameliorate these supply-side drivers in order to make a considerable impact on slavery levels worldwide. The demand side of many modes of slavery, especially sex trafficking, is vulnerable to disruption, and I will outline how we can do so in blogs to come.

Second, take heart in the very first abolitionist movement which commenced when 12 men met in 1787 at a printing shop at 2 George Yard in London. Their mandate was preposterous - to abolish slavery in the British Empire at a time when even the Church of England had slaves. These men toiled tirelessly without telephones and blogs, traveling thousands of miles by horseback, ship, and foot to gather the information and support they needed to succeed. It took 50 years before a bill abolishing slavery in most of the British empire passed both Houses of Parliament. Only one of the original 12 crusaders lived to see that day. We, as the inheritors of this work, need not convince the world that slavery is wrong. That battle is won. We need only to use our collective will to organize a foundation of knowledge and better recommendations that must be bellowed to those in power with sufficient numbers and persuasiveness of argument, to convince them that slavery must be abolished, once and for all!

Siddharth Kara is the author of “Sex Trafficking: Inside the Business of Modern Slavery.” He holds and MBA and a law degree and serves on the Board of Directors of the abolitionist organization, Free the Slaves.