From “Whores” to “Victims”: The Rise and Status of Sex Trafficking Courts

Views of people involved in the commercial sex trade have shifted. Once seen as prostitutes or “whores,” they are increasingly perceived as exploited “victims.” The behavior associated with commercial sex has been redefined from voluntary and disreputable to coerced and deserving of rescue. This new framework is part of a broader anti-trafficking movement in society to recognize and save vulnerable individuals who are exploited for sex. In this context, the model of problem-solving or specialty courts has been extended to sex trafficking cases. The goal first is to identify trafficking victims–also known as “victim-defendants”–and then to address their risk factors with services. The current review examines the prevalence and the effectiveness of sex trafficking courts. Although some promising evaluations have been conducted, it remains unclear whether such courts are addressing the unique needs of victim-defendants. Investigating this question is essential, given that trafficking courts are likely to grow in popularity and in number

The Role of Specialty Courts in Addressing Human Trafficking Cases: A Policy Evaluation

CPACS Inquiry Awards Part of the mission of the College of Public Affairs and Community Service (CPACS) is to conduct research, especially as it relates to concerns of our local and statewide constituencies. The CPACS Inquiry Awards, is one catalyst of the College to assure this mission is fulfilled. CPACS Inquiry Awards are intended to support research of any methodology that explores the nature, scope, concerns and/or solutions to issues of public interest with a focus on examining or demonstrating how such inquiry can positively impact the public(s) researched. For this award the public(s) researched must be relevant to Nebraska and/or our neighbor states

Who Are the Mavens of Bystander Intervention? Implications for the Social Diffusion of Intervention Norms

A recent randomized controlled trial reported that Green Dot (GD)—a bystander intervention training program that targets popular opinion leaders for intensive training—reduced school-level interpersonal violence perpetration and victimization. Expanding GD’s targeted group members to include “mavens” of bystander intervention—those who spread bystander intervention norms to others by communicating with peers—may increase the effectiveness of such training. Self-report data collected from students at the 13 intervention high schools in Kentucky are analyzed to identify characteristics of those who engage in discussions with peers about preventing interpersonal violence. Findings show that students who engage in more frequent bystander behaviors are more likely to have such conversations with peers, but GD participants were no more likely than nonparticipants to discuss preventing interpersonal violence with peers

Less Safe in the Ivory Tower: Campus Sexual Assault Policy in the Trump Administration

Since the late 20th century, the federal government has regulated colleges’ and universities’ handling of campus sexual and gender-based violence (CSGBV). Although the arc of history has bent toward establishing greater protections for victims of such violence, new proposed regulation by the U.S. Department of Education under the Trump administration focuses more heavily on ensuring due process rights for students accused of CSGBV. Most recently, in November 2018, U.S. Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos submitted a proposed rule change to the regulation of Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972. This article provides the historical context for this most recent proposed federal regulation of CSGBV and discusses the criticism of this proposal that, if it is implemented, students would become less safe in the ivory tower

The Application of Bystander Intervention Scripts: Implications for Guardianship in Action

Responding to high rates of interpersonal victimization and perpetration among adolescents, schools have implemented bystander intervention (BI) training to educate students to intervene to prevent or stop violence. These trainings function much like an application of scripts for guardianship in action. The current study builds on the overlapping and complementary bodies of BI and routine activities research by testing whether participation in BI training, namely Green Dot (GD), influences individuals’ underlying ability to intervene. Using four years of survey data collected from high school students (N = 2,374–3,443), we use item response theory to model the difficulty of engaging in different BI behaviors. We then estimate multivariate ordinary least squares regression models, one for each year, to estimate the effect of GD training on students’ ability to intervene. The item response theory results show that BI behaviors differ in terms of how “difficult” they are for respondents to engage in. Findings show that in each year, GD training increased students’ underlying ability to intervene. Our findings suggest BI training and guardianship in action scripts should take into account this varying difficulty of intervention behaviors to best train individuals for successful intervention to prevent victimization

Does Change in Binge Drinking Reduce Risk of Repeat Sexual Assault Victimization? Evidence From Three Cohorts of Freshman Undergraduate Women

Many college students who experience sexual assault experience subsequent (i.e., repeat) sexual assault incidents. There is also an established relationship between sexual assault and binge drinking. The “once bitten, twice shy” (OBTS) hypothesis suggests that those who experience alcohol- or drugrelated (AOD) sexual assault would reduce how frequently they binge drink in an effort to avoid repeat victimization. We test this hypothesis by analyzing two years of survey data collected from a panel of three cohorts of freshmen women. Supportive of OBTS, our analyses reveal that students who experienced an AOD-related sexual assault at time 1 only reduced the number of days they binge drank from time 1 to time 2 and that this change significantly differed from repeat victims. Implications for efforts to reduce sexual victimization against college women are discussed

The REVERE project:Experiments with the application of probabilistic NLP to systems engineering

Despite natural language’s well-documented shortcomings as a medium for precise technical description, its use in software-intensive systems engineering remains inescapable. This poses many problems for engineers who must derive problem understanding and synthesise precise solution descriptions from free text. This is true both for the largely unstructured textual descriptions from which system requirements are derived, and for more formal documents, such as standards, which impose requirements on system development processes. This paper describes experiments that we have carried out in the REVERE1 project to investigate the use of probabilistic natural language processing techniques to provide systems engineering support

Creepers, Druggers, and Predator Ambiguity: The Interactional Construction of Campus Victimization and the University Sex Predator

In response to the pervasive problem of sexual victimization on campus, many colleges in the United States have adopted bystander intervention programs which seek to educate students and provide them with the tools necessary to intervene in potentially risky situations. Research shows that how potential bystanders construct potential victims and perpetrators of campus victimization significantly impacts their progression to intervention. As an extension of Pugh, Ningard, Vander Ven and Butler’s (Deviant Behavior, 2016) work on victim ambiguity, the present study drew from intensive interviews of 30 undergraduates from a large university in the American Midwest to examine how students construct perpetrators in situations that hold the potential for sexual assault. Findings suggest that common stereotypes about alcohol, sexual assault, and risk guided bystander constructions of potential perpetrators of sexual assault in the drinking scene, which influenced their self-reported intervention likelihood. Respondents referred to strangers, the transient type (i.e., those who suspiciously leave a party scene with a woman), “druggers,” “creepers,” and other social indicators when discussing typical predators and the informal strategies for recognizing them in the drinking scene. Program implications are discussed

Victim Ambiguity: Bystander Intervention and Sexual Assault in the College Drinking Scene

Alcohol-related sexual assault is the most common form of sexual victimization on college campuses. Bystander intervention has been suggested as effective in preventing sexual assault, but its usefulness in sexual assaults that involve alcohol in particular has not yet been examined. The current study draws from intensive interviews with 30 undergraduates at a large Midwestern university to understand how students’ perceptions about sexual victimization and alcohol use affect their bystander behavior. Findings suggest that in alcohol-involved situations, the ambiguity of whether the woman is at risk and her perceived worthiness are significant barriers to intervention. Policy implications are discussed

When Bad News Arrives: Project HOPE in a Post-Factual World

On the basis of limited empirical evidence, advocates of Project HOPE (Hawaii’s Opportunity Probation with Enforcement) have succeeded in spreading the model to a reported 31 states and 160 locations. A recent randomized control experiment across four sites has revealed negative results: no overall effect on recidivism. In this context, we examine how prominent advocates of Project HOPE have coped with the arrival of this “bad news.” Despite null findings from a “gold standard” evaluation study, advocates continue to express confidence in the HOPE model and to support its further implementation. The risk thus exists that Project HOPE is entering a post-factual world in which diminishing its appeal—let alone its falsification—is not possible. It is the collective responsibility of corrections researchers to warn policy makers that the HOPE model is not a proven intervention and may not be effective in many agencies. It is also our responsibility to create a science of community supervision that can establish more definitively best practices in this area