11 research outputs found
A Screening tool for Identification of Victims of Commercial Sexual Exploitation of Children
Background: Commercial sexual exploitation of children (CSEC) and sex trafficking have only recently been recognized as problems by healthcare providers. Both UNICEF (2014) and the Institute of Medicine (2013) have stressed the need for systematic research to assist healthcare providers in the identification of victims. The aim of this poster is to describe initial findings relating to the development of a screening tool to identify CSEC victims.
Methods: Twenty-seven sites nationwide (e.g., emergency departments and specialized clinics) participated in a study to validate a screening tool for identifying CSEC victims in an outpatient setting. The study was conducted under approval from the Institutional Review Board at Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta. Inclusion criteria for the study generally involved being an English-speaking adolescent aged 11-18 years.
Results: Study enrollment is ongoing. Preliminary data for 210 youth were analyzed for this abstract. The sample was diverse with respect to age (M=14.59 years, SD=1.490 years) and ethnicity (56.4% Caucasian, 31.8% African American, 3.9% mixed race, and 7.8% Hispanic); the sample was predominantly female (92.8%). Of the 210 youth in the sample, 115(54.8%) have had sex. Of these 115 youth, 13(11.3%) have traded sex for money, drugs, or housing; 7(58.3%) of 12(10.4%) complied when asked by someone to have sex with another person; 8(61.5%) of 13(11.3%) performed sexual acts in public when propositioned; and 19(45.2%) of 42(36.5%) shared provocative photos when prompted. Medical providers flagged 14 youth (6.7% of total 210) as potential CSEC victims.
Conclusions: The screening tool shows promise for effective identification of CSEC victims. This poster will present additional data and further quantitative analyses exploring the influences of sexual behavior, drug and alcohol use, and other factors on the risk of becoming a CSEC victim. Implications for researchers and clinicians will also be discussed
Africa on the British stage, 1955-1966
Covering the period between Reginald Craddock’s Night Returns to Africa (1955) and the staging of Wole Soyinka’s The Lion and the Jewel (1966), this chapter will examine key images of and from Africa as they were offered to British theatregoers. It will refer to dance, revues, and musicals as well as plays, and to the work of British dramatists as well as to that of African playwrights including Wole Soyinka, John Pepper Clark, and Guillaume Oyono-Mbia. Crucially, the chapter will focus on how such work was framed and received by theatre critics and within the press, suggesting some of the ways in which performances rooted in elements of ‘African’ culture may have exerted wider influences on and within the British theatrical establishment
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Satellite-supported flood forecasting in river networks: a real case study
Satellite-based (e.g., Synthetic Aperture Radar [SAR]) water level observations (WLOs) of the floodplain can be sequentially assimilated into a hydrodynamic model to decrease forecast uncertainty. This has the potential to keep the forecast on track, so providing an Earth Observation (EO) based flood forecast system. However, the operational applicability of such a system for floods developed over river networks requires further testing. One of the promising techniques for assimilation in this field is the family of ensemble Kalman (EnKF) filters. These filters use a limited-size ensemble representation of the forecast error covariance matrix. This representation tends to develop spurious correlations as the forecast-assimilation cycle proceeds, which is a further complication for dealing with floods in either urban areas or river junctions in rural environments. Here we evaluate the assimilation of WLOs obtained from a sequence of real SAR overpasses (the X-band COSMO-Skymed constellation) in a case study. We show that a direct application of a global Ensemble Transform Kalman Filter (ETKF) suffers from filter divergence caused by spurious correlations. However, a spatially-based filter localization provides a substantial moderation in the development of the forecast error covariance matrix, directly improving the forecast and also making it possible to further benefit from a simultaneous online inflow error estimation and correction. Additionally, we propose and evaluate a novel along-network metric for filter localization, which is physically-meaningful for the flood over a network problem. Using this metric, we further evaluate the simultaneous estimation of channel friction and spatially-variable channel bathymetry, for which the filter seems able to converge simultaneously to sensible values. Results also indicate that friction is a second order effect in flood inundation models applied to gradually varied flow in large rivers. The study is not conclusive regarding whether in an operational situation the simultaneous estimation of friction and bathymetry helps the current forecast. Overall, the results indicate the feasibility of stand-alone EO-based operational flood forecasting