Achieving the G20 gender equality target by tackling sexual exploitation through legal uniformity, extra territoriality and corporate responsibility

Exploitation of some individuals and groups by others is a depressingly familiar aspect of human society which enables one individual or group to succeed at the expense of another. Whilst not seeking to downplay abuse of men and male children, this paper focuses on sexual exploitation of women and girls, whether through direct violence, the imposition of fear or coercion, and whether or not for financial motivation. We have chosen sexual exploitation because, as we shall see, it is predominantly directed at women and girls and has uniquely traumatic effect. Sexual exploitation may occur within territorial boundaries but it has become increasingly transnational through travelling abusers (often serial intimate partners), human trafficking and online sexual exploitation (which has a particular effect on the progress of female children ). Law and policy have both developed separate approaches in relation to sexual exploitation within relationships as opposed to where it occurs for profit. In our view, any policy or legislative distinction between domestic and organised sexual crime is artificial, unnecessary and counter-productive. The common manipulation of the intimate partner relationship for commercial sexual exploitation is an obvious example of the failure of this approach. Tackling this as purely commercial or purely domestic ignores vital causes and consequences. Although the causes of sexual exploitation may differ depending on the relationship between victim and exploiter, the result is the same: an exploited victim. Importantly, the longer term consequences for the victims are often the same whether the exploitation takes place in a purely domestic or commercial context.Health consequences from sexual exploitation are well researched. Women and girls are inhibited by the lack of empowerment this brings in reaching their full potential. This has a knock on effect in the workforce of any state, with a consequent effect on economic prosperity. In November 2014, the G20 countries committed to a “goal of reducing the gap in participation rates between men and women [in the G20 countries] by 25% by 2025, taking into account national circumstances, to bring more than 100 million women into the labour force in order to significantly increase global growth and reduce poverty and inequality”. It has been said that there are three key levers to achieve female workforce participation – social change in the sense of changing norms and stereotypes about work undertaken, policy change in relation to incentives and child care and workplace change closing gaps in wages and increasing the number of women in leadership positions . This paper seeks to add a fourth dimension in the context of empowering women by tackling sexual exploitation. We suggest the need to focus on legal uniformity, extra territoriality and corporate responsibility. We argue that there is a link between legal and policy approaches to sexual exploitation and the successful empowerment of women through employment. If equality is a genuine goal then the policy on sexual exploitation needs to be addressed at global level in the context of law and economic progress

Patterns of sexual behaviour: the law of evidence: back to the future in Australia and England

A recent Victorian Court of Appeal ruling [in Australia] has sparked concerns that a clamp down on the way child abuse cases are handled could thwart convictions. The Court of Appeal justices ruled only cases that are "remarkably" similar would go before the same jury, making it harder for allegations from multiple complainants to be heard together. There are concerns that this will reduce the number of convictions for sexual offences, especially for those against children. This article explores the approach in England and Wales, and Australia to evidence of a pattern of behaviour, focussing on when it is adduced in cases involving sexual abuse. We first consider the shared common law history of the two jurisdictions before exploring how common law and legislative changes have led to surprisingly different positions in the two countries. We conclude by suggesting a simpler and more rational approach which has started to emerge and could be adopted in both countries, and indeed should be considered in any jurisdiction

Rationalizing Historical Successes of Malaria Control in Africa in Terms of Mosquito Resource Availability Management.

Environmental management of mosquito resources is a promising approach with which to control malaria, but it has seen little application in Africa for more than half a century. Here we present a kinetic model of mosquito foraging for aquatic habitats and vertebrate hosts that allows estimation of malaria transmission intensity by defining the availability of these resources as the rate at which individual mosquitoes encounter and use them. The model captures historically observed responses of malaria transmission to environmental change, highlights important gaps in current understanding of vector ecology, and suggests convenient solutions. Resource availability is an intuitive concept that provides an adaptable framework for models of mosquito population dynamics, gene flow, and pathogen transmission that can be conveniently parameterized with direct field measurements. Furthermore, the model presented predicts that drastic reductions of malaria transmission are possible with environmental management and elucidates an ecologic basis for previous successes of integrated malaria control in Africa before the advent of DDT or chloroquine. Environmental management for malaria control requires specialist skills that are currently lacking in sub-Saharan Africa where they are needed most. Infrastructure and human capacity building in clinical, public health, and environmental disciplines should therefore be prioritized so that growing financial support for tackling malaria can be translated into truly integrated control programs

Potential Causes and Consequences of Behavioural Resilience and Resistance in Malaria Vector Populations: A Mathematical Modelling Analysis

The ability of mosquitoes to evade fatal exposure to insecticidal nets and sprays represents the primary obstacle to eliminating malaria. However, it remains unclear which behaviours are most important for buffering mosquito and parasite populations against vector control. Simulated life histories were used to compare the impact of alternative feeding behavior strategies upon overall lifetime feeding success, and upon temporal distributions of successful feeds and biting rates experienced by unprotected humans, in the presence and absence of insecticidal nets. Strictly nocturnal preferred feeding times were contrasted with 1) a wider preference window extending to dawn and dusk, and 2) crepuscular preferences wherein foraging is suppressed when humans sleep and can use nets but is maximal immediately before and after. Simulations with diversion and mortality parameters typical of endophagic, endophilic African vectors, such as Anopheles gambiae and Anopheles funestus, were compared with those for endophagic but exophilic species, such as Anopheles arabiensis, thatalso enter houses but leave earlier before lethal exposure to insecticide-treated surfaces occurs. Insecticidal nets were predicted to redistribute successful feeding events to dawn and dusk where these were included in the profile of innately preferred feeding times. However, predicted distributions of biting unprotected humans, were unaffected because extended hostseeking activity was redistributed to innately preferred feeding times. Recently observed alterations of biting activity distributions therefore reflect processes not captured in this model, such as evolutionary selection of heritably modified feeding time preferences or phenotypically plastic expression of feeding time preference caused by associative learning. Surprisingly, endophagy combined with exophily, among mosquitoes that enter houses but then feed and/or rest briefly before rapidly exiting, consistently attenuated predicted insecticide impact more than any feeding time preference trait. Regardless of underlying cause, recent redistributions of host-biting activity to dawn and dusk necessitate new outdoor control strategies. However, persistently indoor-feeding vectors, that evade intradomiciliary insecticide exposure, are at least equally important. Fortunately, recent evaluations of occupied houses or odour-baited stations, with baffled entrances that retain An. arabiensis within insecticide-treated structures, illustrate how endophagic but exophilic vectors may be more effectively tackled using existing insecticides

Loss-Induced Limits to Phase Measurement Precision with Maximally Entangled States

The presence of loss limits the precision of an approach to phase measurement using maximally entangled states, also referred to as NOON states. A calculation using a simple beam-splitter model of loss shows that, for all nonzero values L of the loss, phase measurement precision degrades with increasing number N of entangled photons for N sufficiently large. For L above a critical value of approximately 0.785, phase measurement precision degrades with increasing N for all values of N. For L near zero, phase measurement precision improves with increasing N down to a limiting precision of approximately 1.018 L radians, attained at N approximately equal to 2.218/L, and degrades as N increases beyond this value. Phase measurement precision with multiple measurements and a fixed total number of photons N_T is also examined. For L above a critical value of approximately 0.586, the ratio of phase measurement precision attainable with NOON states to that attainable by conventional methods using unentangled coherent states degrades with increasing N, the number of entangled photons employed in a single measurement, for all values of N. For L near zero this ratio is optimized by using approximately N=1.279/L entangled photons in each measurement, yielding a precision of approximately 1.340 sqrt(L/N_T) radians.Comment: Additional references include

Strong violations of Bell-type inequalities for Werner-like states

We investigate the violation of Bell-type inequalities for two-qubit Werner-like states parametrized by the positive parameter 0<p<1. We use an unbalanced homodyne detection scheme to obtain the quantum mechanical probabilities. A violation of the Bell-Wigner and Janssens inequalities is obtained for a large range of the parameter p. The range given by these inequalities is greater than the one given by the Clauser-Horne inequality. The range in which a violation is attained actually coincides with the range where the Werner-like states are known to be nonseparabel, i.e., for p>1/3. However, the improvement over the Clauser-Horne inequality is achieved at the price of restricting the class of possible local hidden variable theories.Comment: Revised manuscript, accepted for publication in PR