The Human Rights of Sex Trafficking Survivors: Trends and Challenges in American Vacatur Laws

For years, survivors of sex trafficking, people compelled by force or circumstance to engage in sex acts, were often wrongly convicted of prostitution and many collateral crimes in the United States. These convictions became a permanent part of survivors’ criminal records, inhibiting their ability to satisfy necessities for a dignified life—finding work and a place to live, or going to school. Since 2010, forty-five state legislatures across the US have sought to solve this problem by passing vacatur laws. These laws allow the survivors of sex trafficking a means to erase certain charges and convictions from their records. The American movement to support the human rights of sex trafficking victims is part of a larger, global non-criminalization movement to support survivors’ human rights. This article surveys the recent and robust diffusion of American vacatur laws, situates them amidst the larger, global non-criminalization movement, and highlights both the strengths and weaknesses of the current US vacatur laws with an eye toward closing the rights gap for sex trafficking survivors. We argue that extant vacatur legislation should be expanded to include all crimes traffickers compel victims to commit, should incorporate trauma-informed means for establishing victimhood, and should be passed at the federal level to ensure complete and uniform protection

Can the health effects of widely-held societal norms be evaluated? An analysis of the United Nations convention on the elimination of all forms of discrimination against women (UN-CEDAW)

Abstract Background Female life expectancy and mortality rates have been improving over the course of many decades. Many global changes offer potential explanations. In this paper, we examined whether the United Nations Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) has, in part, been responsible for the observed improvements in these key population metrics of women’s health. Methods Data were obtained from the United Nations Treaty Series Database, the World Bank World Development Indicators database and, the Polity IV database. Because CEDAW is nearly universally ratified, it was not feasible to compare ratifying countries to non-ratifying countries. We therefore applied interrupted times series analyses, which creates a comparator (counterfactual) scenario by using the trend in the health outcome before the policy exposure to mathematically determine what the trend in the health outcome would have been after the policy exposure, had the policy exposure not occurred. Analyses were stratified by country-level income and democratization. Results Among low-income countries, CEDAW improved outcomes in democratic, but not non-democratic countries. In middle-income countries, CEDAW largely had no effect and, among high-income countries, had largely positive effects. Conclusions While population indicators of women’s health have improved since CEDAW ratification, the impact of CEDAW ratification itself on these improvements varies across countries with differing levels of income and democratization

Did the UN convention on the rights of the child reduce child mortality around the world? An interrupted time series analysis

Abstract Background Child mortality has been reduced by more than 50 % over the past 30 years. A range of secular economic and social developments have been considered to explain this phenomenon. In this paper, we examine the association between ratification of the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), which was specifically put in place to ensure the well-being of children, and declines in child mortality. Methods Data come from three sources: the United Nations Treaty Series Database, the World Bank World Development Indicators database and, the Polity IV database. Because CRC was widely ratified, leaving few control cases, we used interrupted times series analyses, which uses the trend in the health outcome before policy exposure to mathematically determine what the trend in the health outcome would have been after the policy exposure, if it had continued ‘as is’ – meaning, if the policy exposure had not occurred. Results CRC ratification was associated with declining child mortality. CRC ratification was associated with a significant change in shorter-term child mortality trends in all groups except high-income, non-democratic countries and low-imcome democratic countries. CRC ratification was associated with long-term child mortality trends in all groups except middle-income, non-democratic countries. Conclusions Child mortality rates would likely have declined even in the absence of CRC ratification, but CRC is associated with a larger decline. Our findings provide a way to assess the effects of widely-held societal norms on health and demonstrate the moderating effects of democracy and income level

Relativizing Human Rights : A New System for Country Ranking

Research, policy analysis, and conditional aid policy among some donor countries rely on standards-based measures of country human rights performance. These measures code annual performance based on narrative reports published by the US State Department and Amnesty International. The coding yields a performance ranking for countries that in our view is ?absolute? or reflects that current state of human rights performance without taking into account the relative social, political, or economic conditions within countries. While this absolute ranking is useful for empirical analyses of some human rights questions and policy applications, it can lead to perverse outcomes in other areas of work. This article provides an alternative method for ranking country human rights performance that takes into account an array of additional variables that are related to the protection of civil and political rights. The method involves three stages. Stage one applies principal component factor analysis to five different standards-based measures of civil and political rights to extract a single human rights ?factor score.? Stage two regresses the factor score on a series of explanatory variables for the protection of civil and political rights for which there is widespread consensus and then saves the residual as an indicator of the ?over? or ?under? performance of countries with respect to the protection of those rights. Stage three plots the ?factor score? alongside the relative score to compare these different measures of human rights performance over time and across different regions. Our results lead to a new depiction of human rights progress in the world that we believe will be of interest to human rights scholars and practitioners