The People's Choice: Carnegie Council Top Ten 2009

2009 was a hard year on many fronts and this feeling was reflected in the Carnegie Council audience favorites. Concerns include making sense of the financial crisis; predicting future risks; and coming up with new strategies for the 21st century.

No. 7 on the list, "Top Risks and Ethical Decisions, 2009," was so popular that on January 13 a similar panel will predict their "Top Risks" for 2010 (with live webcast).

1. The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World
Niall Ferguson, Harvard University (video, audio, transcript)
The economies of China and America are so entwined that neither can afford to let the other fail.

2. The Next 100 Years: A Forecast for the 21st Century
George Friedman, Strategic Forecasting, Inc. (video, audio, transcript)
Which nations will be the winners and losers? These predictions may surprise you.

3. Sex Trafficking: Inside the Business of Modern Slavery
Siddharth Kara, Free the Slaves (video, audio, transcript)
The biggest illegal business after drugs, sex slaves generated profits of $35.7 billion in 2007.

4. On Promoting Democracy
Michael Walzer, Institute for Advanced Study (article)
States are not the only, or even the most important, agents of regime change.

5. Dead Aid: Why Aid Is Not Working and How There Is a Better Way for Africa
Dambisa Moyo, Economic specialist, Sub-Saharan Africa (video, audio, transcript)
Decades of international aid have only made things worse in Africa.

6. The Balance between Risk and Return Is Everybody's Business
Ann Rutledge, R&R Consulting (article)
Risk has shifted from corporations to individuals, and many ordinary Americans got burned.

7. Top Risks and Ethical Decisions, 2009
Ian Bremmer, Eurasia Group; Art Kleiner, Booz & Company; Michele Wucker, World Policy Institute; Thomas Stewart, Booz & Company (video, audio, transcript)
This expert panel predicts risks for what they agree will be a very tough year.

8. The Crisis of Islamic Civilization
Ali A. Allawi, former Iraq government official (video, audio, transcript)
What caused the decline of Islamic civilization and how can it be revived?

9. The Crisis of American Foreign Policy: Wilsonianism in the Twenty-First Century
Anne-Marie Slaughter, U.S. State Department (video, audio, transcript)
Who's right, the neocons or the liberal internationalists?

10. Justice: What's the Right Thing to Do?
Michael Sandel, Harvard University (video, audio, transcript)
A lively debate with the audience on what we owe to society.

Siddharth Kara at the Carnegie Council

Earlier this month at the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs, Siddharth Kara discussed his latest book, Sex Trafficking: Inside the Business of Modern Slavery. Kara provided a rare business analysis of the sex industry, looking at supply and demand factors, profitability, and growth of the industry, and shared first-hand accounts of its victims.





Kara began with a narrative of a young girl from Albania, "Inez," who had been kidnapped, repeatedly raped, smuggled over the border, and forced into prostitution. When she managed to escape after two years, Inez was shunned by her father and forced to live on the streets. She was promised work in Italy, but was again brought into an international sex trafficking ring. Inez was detained by the police for having false documents and when she was released, the police forced her to return to the men who enslaved her. This time, Inez became pregnant and when she was able to escape back to her home, her family again shunned her and her child.





According to Kara, Inez's situation is illustrative of some key components of the sex trade:

-economic deprivation makes individuals vulnerable to exploitation

-victims are quickly broken down by physical and psychological torture

-trafficking victims often endure a cycle of exploitation, and even if they do manage to escape, they are thrown back into the same conditions that led to their initial enslavement.

Kara identified two principal drivers of the sex trade industry as high profitability and extremely low risk. Worldwide sex trafficking brought in $35.7 billion in 2007, making it the most profitable illicit industry next to the drug trade. In India, profits of approximately $12,900 per slave per year can be generated by exploiting sex slaves, while the only criminal penalty for the practice is a $44 fine for owning a brothel.

Even when stiff penalties are written into law, levels of prosecution and conviction of sex slave exploiters tend to be minor, due to corruption, poor witness protection programs, insufficient evidence gathering, a lack of cross-border cooperation, and other factors.

The best near-term solution to the illicit sex trade, according to Kara, is to reduce aggregate demand by attacking the industry's profitability. Commercial sex is a highly elastic product, so as price increases, consumer demand decreases. In order to attack profitability, Kara recommends elevating risk.

Four main impediments to dealing effectively with the illicit sex trade were identified: the crime is poorly understood; NGOs dealing with the issue are underfunded and poorly coordinated; laws against the crimes are poorly enforced; and few people have a detailed economic understanding of the industry.





Kara outlined seven tactics to reduce demand, elevate risk, and shorten the duration of enslavement:

-the creation of an international slavery and trafficking inspection force similar to United Nations weapons inspectors

-community vigilance committees trained to report signs of potential slavery to local police or trafficking inspection force

-targeted, proactive raids on establishments suspected of slave-like exploitation

-increased funding for salaries to police, border patrol, prosecutors, and judges to decreased risk of corruption

-special fast-track courts to prosecute crimes, with international observers and judicial review

-fully funded witness protection for slaves

-increased financial penalties associated with sex-slave crimes









Kara admits that the challenges to ending sex trafficking are immense, but believes that with increased resources and awareness, it can be done.