Sex Trafficking in the United States: Issues of Prevention, Protection, Prosecution, and Partnerships

Sex trafficking is affecting every nation across the world, and the United States is no exception. Through the United States’ efforts, along with other nations and the United Nations, the awareness level of this crime is growing, but much work lies ahead. With such laws as the Victims of Trafficking and Violence Protection (TVPA) passed in 2000, and the UN-mandated “4P” paradigm, the United States is making an effort to combat sex trafficking. In this paper I have outlined three states, Georgia, New York, and Washington, and looked into the nature and extent of sex trafficking in each state, as well as their legislation, prevention and protection efforts, and partnerships between the government and non-governmental organizations. By studying the efforts of these three states, my goal is to raise awareness of the topic of sex trafficking, how it is affecting the United States, and ways in which sex trafficking is being combated, federally and at the state level

I Like It But I Don't Know Why: A Value-Account Approach to Implicit Attitude Formation

The authors suggest a theory that predicts how summary evaluations about targets are implicitly formed and stored in memory and under which conditions they are used in attitude judgment. First, it is assumed that the mere encoding of value-charged stimuli is a sufficient condition to initiate implicit online formation of summary evaluations. Second, the authors claim that this process is summative. Accordingly, the intensities of the positive or negative responses evoked by the stimuli in the organism are thought to be accumulated and stored in a unitary memory structure. This hypothetical structure is called value account. Third, it is assumed that a value account is more easily accessible in memory than are concrete traces of past experiences. Therefore, attitude judgments should rely on value accounts, especially if cognitive capacities are constrained (e.g., due to time pressure). Three experiments that provide converging evidence for the value-account approach are reported