Siddharth Kara is an author, researcher, screenwriter, and activist on modern slavery. He is a British Academy Global Professor and a Visiting Scientist at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Kara has authored three books on modern slavery: Sex Trafficking: Inside the Business of Modern Slavery (2009); Bonded Labor: Tackling the System of Slavery in South Asia (2012); and Modern Slavery: A Global Perspective (2017), each with Columbia University Press. Kara adapted his first book into a Hollywood film, Trafficked. Kara has also authored the reports: Tainted Carpets: Slavery and Child Labor in India’s Hand-Made Carpet Sector (Harvard, 2014), and Tainted Garments: The Exploitation of Women and Girls in India’s Home-Based Garment Sector (UC Berkeley, 2019).
Across twenty-one years of research, Kara has traveled to more than fifty countries to document the cases of several thousand slaves of all kinds. He has mapped global human trafficking networks, explored the perilous underground of trafficked sex slaves, and traced global supply chains of numerous commodities tainted by slavery and child labor. Kara advises several UN agencies and numerous governments on anti-slavery policy and law. He has also appeared extensively in the media as an expert on modern slavery, including on CNN, the BBC, the Guardian, CNBC, National Geographic, and numerous documentary films. Previously, Kara was an investment banker at Merrill Lynch, then ran his own finance and M&A consulting firm. He holds a Law degree from England, MBA from Columbia University, and BA from Duke University.