By R. Barri Flowers

At the dawn of the twenty-first century, we are confronted with a number of serious social issues that have carried over from the past century. One of these relates to the growing phenomenon of runaway prostitution involved children and the implications. Each year in the United States, as many as 2 million children leave home for whereabouts unknown by the parents or caretakers. Tens of thousands of other children are pushed out of the house or abandoned by parents or guardians. These caretakers may be aware of where these youths are located, but do not want to find them and bring them back home. This only exacerbates the problem of homeless street kids who must not only search for survival but also search for love in all the wrong places. However, not all runaways leave home due to intolerable conditions or family dysfunction. Some find they prefer to be on their own for various reasons including independence, sex, problems at school, rebellion, drug addiction, and adventure. Rarely do they find a better life away from home. The correlation between running away from home and harsh street life such as exposure to prostitution, substance abuse, AIDS, sexually transmitted diseases, violence, criminality, and victimization has been well documented, as have findings that many children who run away from home were victims of child sexual abuse, neglect, family violence, broken homes, impoverishment, mental illness, and other familial and personal conflicts. Given the convergence of past, present, and future abuses and traumas the runaway is typically exposed to, it is obvious that most are caught up in a horrible cycle for which there seems no escape. Of course, there is a way out, but only if we as a society come to better understand how and why children leave home in the first place, and how their needs can most effectively be addressed and acted upon.

Westport, CT: Praeger, 2001. 232p.

By Hannah Ford

Until recently, the topic of female sexual offenders remained under-researched, and many incorrect assumptions and beliefs still surround the subject. This book is organised in to five parts around eleven chapters. It provides a comprehensive overview of the latest research in this often overlooked area and discusses both adult female offenders and adolescents/younger children who commit sexual offences against children. After an in-depth evaluation of research literature, the author then considers a range of treatment approaches and directions for future research.

Chichester, UK: Wiley, 2004. 206p.

By Brandy Bang, Paige L. Baker, Alexis Carpinteri, and Vincent B. Van Hasselt

"Biological, psychological, and environmental risk factors leave children and adolescents vulnerable to corruption, coercion, and violence, as in cases of young people being trafficked and sexually exploited. While the public tends to associate such abuses with far-off locales, the numbers of American-born children targeted by sex traffickers, and of international youth brought to the U.S. by these exploiters, are growing and disturbing. Concise and well-detailed, Commercial Sexual Exploitation of Children examines the severity and complexity of this form of crime, and how it is being addressed through law enforcement and legal channels. The book examines variables that make children susceptible to exploitation, with a special focus on male victims. Mechanisms of the offenses are covered, as are the current state of federal laws and strengths and shortcomings of prosecution efforts. Real-life case examples from federal law enforcement describe major forms of exploitation and victim and offender characteristics, with clear focus on such areas as: Sex trafficking risk factors. Methods of victimization by child prostitution. Consumers, traders, and distributors of child pornography. Offender networks in child pornography. The preferential sex tourist. Enticement/grooming processes of the sex traveler. Commercial Sexual Exploitation of Children is a ready source of facts geared toward assisting professionals on the frontlines of intervention and prevention with this often-marginalized population, from health care and mental health providers and researchers to legislative bodies and law enforcement, as well as students interested in criminal justice, psychology, or law.

Cham: Springer, 2014. 62p.

By Cubides Kovacsics, María Inés; Lanz Sánchez, Alejandro

Since September of 2012, we have been conducting Participatory Action Research (PAR) in the center of Bogotá with sex workers regarding their right to the public space known as 'La Mariposa' (The Butterfly), an open‐air plaza where they often face discriminatory urban praxis and frequent abuse by police officers. While our PAR team has conducted research in 'The Butterfly' for over five years, the objectives, motivation and design of this PAR project were defined by community‐based peer leaders and driven by their concerns and testimonies about the abuse and discrimination they have experienced from police in the plaza. Sex workers in the plaza have described these experiences in terms of unjustified detention, physical and verbal abuse, discrimination and abuse due to sexual orientation, and urban displacement. In this paper, we will discuss our PAR team's action research agenda and our collective work promoting sex worker's re‐appropriation of their right to public space and the city. We will provide concrete examples of ethical dilemmas we have faced in the field and the corresponding praxis our PAR team developed to negotiate and overcome these dilemmas through our 'PARCES' (Translated Acronym: Peers in Action Reaction Against Social Exclusion) methodology. The principles of 'PARCES' and 'action‐reaction' guide our decision‐making process with research actors throughout the construction of the action research design, implementation and analysis in order to incorporate participatory relations and the consideration of research actors' safety, health, and rights within the ethical framework of the project.

Bogotá, Colombia: Universidad de los Andes ‐ Escuela de Gobierno Alberto Lleras Camargo, 2014. 32p.

By Tyrone Kirchengast

This book brings together the diverse and fragmented rights and powers of victims constitutive of the modern adversarial criminal trial as found across the common law jurisdictions of the world. One characteristic of victim rights as they emerge within and constitute aspects of the modern criminal trial is that they are dispersed within an existing criminal process that largely identifies the offender as the benefactor of due process rights, originating in the seventeenth-century adversarial criminal trial. This trial increasingly excluded the victim for the Crown and state, and the role of the victim was slowly eroded to that of witness for the prosecution as the adversarial trial matured into the latter part of the twentieth century. Increasing awareness of the removal of the victim and the need to secure the rights and interests of victims as stakeholders of justice resulted in the last decade of the twentieth century, bearing witness to the gradual relocation of the victim in common law and statute. This relocation has occurred, however, in a highly fragmented and disconnected way, usually following spontaneous and at times ill thought-out law reform initiatives that may or may not connect to the spirit of existing reforms, foundational structures of the criminal process, or international or domestic rights frameworks that have emerged in the meantime.

London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. 360p.

By Roderic Broadhurst, Brigitte Bouhours, and John Bacon-Shone

Between 2003 and 2009, the International Violence Against Women Survey (IVAWS) has been conducted in 12 developed and developing countries. The IVAWS is a comprehensive instrument that measures women’s experiences of physical and sexual violence by men, including intimate partners, victims’ help-seeking behaviour and the response of.... was conducted in Hong Kong and, for this reason, no trends in violence over time are available; however, because the IVAWS uses standardised questions and data collection methods, results can be compared with those of the other countries that participated in the survey. The report shows rates of victimisation for seven types of physical..... who the perpetrator was, particularly whether it was an intimate partner, a relative, a friend or acquaintance, or a stranger. Women who had recent incident, such as whether they had reported the assault to the police or victim support services. Drawing on socio-demographic and behavioual information on both respondents and their partners, the report examines the predictors of violent victimisation by partners and non-partners.

Hong Kong: University of Hong Kong; Canberra: Australian National University, 2012. 110p.

By Sara Bianca Taverriti

Irregular migrants face particular challenges in interacting with law enforcement authorities to report a crime, as they fear detection and deportation. This fear, together with their generally precarious situation, makes them particularly vulnerable to crime. This report aims to explain the existing legislation, policy and practices impacting on migrants’ ability to access the Criminal Justice System in Italy, as either victims or witnesses, without running the risk of self-incrimination or deportation. In particular, the report focuses on ‘firewall’ practices – that is, measures that encourage reporting of crime by migrants with irregular status by neutralising the risk and the fear of deportation and expulsion as a consequence of reporting crime. This report is intended to analyse the strengths and weaknesses of these measures, in order to assess their effectiveness in facilitating safe reporting of crime by irregular migrants. Finally, the report will consider the potential of policy reforms in the area of safe reporting, including by considering the potential for implementation in Italy of local measures known as ‘sanctuary policies’. This research contributes to a project on safe reporting of crime for victims and witnesses with irregular migration status in Europe and the United States undertaken by the Centre on Migration, Policy and Society (COMPAS) at the University of Oxford.1 As well as Italy, this project examines the United States, Spain, the Netherlands and Belgium. The ultimate aim of the project is to promote learning of best practices and knowledge-exchange on this topic between countries. It also aims to evaluate the legal and political replicability of ‘firewall’ policies across different countries, and in particular the legal replicability of US experiences (for example, that of ‘sanctuary cities’) in European contexts.

Bristol, UK: COMPAS, Global Exchange on Migration and Diversity, 2019. 46p.

By Markus González Beilfuss

According to the European Union (EU) Victims-Directive, victims of crime have the right to be informed, supported and protected, as well as to participate in criminal proceedings. EU Member States retain notable scope for action to transpose these rights into their national legislation, but with the entry into force of this Directive in October 2012, victims' protection entitlements improved significantly within thre remit of EU Law. However, foreign victims with irregular migration status are still in a vulnerable position. Indeed, they are included in the Directive in a particular way. On the one hand, Member States have to take the necessary measures to ensure that the rights set out in the Directive are not conditional on the victim's residence status. According to Art. 1.1, the rights delineated shall apply to all victims in a non-discriminatory manner, including with respect to their residence status. Nevertheless, on the other hand the Directive does not address the conditions of the residence of crime victims in the territory of the Member States. As mentioned in the preamble of the Directive (Recital 10), ‘reporting a crime and participating in criminal proceedings do not create any rights regarding the residence status of the victim’. Victims of crime with irregular migration status fall under the scope of the EU's Return-Directive. As with any third-country nationals staying irregularly in their territories, Member States shall issue them with a return decision. As stated in Art. 6.4 of the Return-Directive, ‘compassionate, humanitarian or other reasons’ allow Member States to grant at any moment a residence permit or the right to stay to any person with irregular migration status. However, EU law does not directly grant these victims of crime the right to stay if they report the case to the police or the criminal justice system. The outcome of the existing legal framework can be particularly harmful for these crime victims, who are exposed to retaliation and can fear deportation if they report the crime to the police. But it also impacts upon the whole criminal justice system, which may lose crucial actors for the prosecution of crime. In the last decade, EU and international law have started to bring in some exceptions to this inconsistent and harmful legal system. According to Directive 2004/81/EC, victims of human trafficking have access to a so-called ‘reflection period’ that allows them to recover and escape from the influence of traffickers. During this period, it is not possible to enforce deportation orders of third-country national victims, and once the reflection period is finished, victims may under certain circumstances access a residence permit.

Oxford, UK: COMPAS, Global Exchange on Migration and Diversity, 2019. 33p.

By Ruben Timmerman, Arjen Leerkes, and Richard Staring

Across Europe, irregular migrants experience considerable difficulty obtaining basic access to justice, protection, and services across a wide range of areas. The structural exclusion of irregular migrants from the integration strategies of European Union (EU) Member States serves in many situations to limit the full exercise of their basic rights, including in particular the right of an individual to safely report to the police if they have been a victim of or witness to crime.1 In recent years, however, efforts have been made to ensure that irregular migrants within Europe are guaranteed equal access to justice and basic rights should they fall victim to crime. Perhaps most notably, Directive 2012/29/EU of the European Parliament and of the Council of 25 October 2012 establishing minimum standards on the rights, support and protection of victims of crime (hereinafter, Victims’ Directive), which entered into force in 2015, sets out to ensure that the rights of all victims of crime are protected, regardless of nationality or residence status.2 Among other things, the EU Victims’ Directive signifies—at least on paper—the inclusion of irregular migrants within the wider purview of victims’ rights. However, there remain significant challenges and barriers to access to justice and rights for irregular migrant victims of crime within Europe, and there is much work still to be done in effectively realising the vision set out by the EU Victims’ Directive. In particular, it has long been observed by human rights observers, scholars, and practitioners in the field of migration that irregular migrants are often hesitant or unwilling to contact or interact with law enforcement authorities to report crime, either as victims or as witnesses, out of fear of arrest or deportation.3 As a result, these irregular migrants are unable to exercise their basic rights to necessary services, protection, and justice, and are often more vulnerable to perpetrators who are able to exploit their reluctance to report crime. Moreover, the lack of opportunity for irregular migrants to safely report crime results in a lack of crucial intelligence about criminal activity for law enforcement, and significantly reduces authorities’ insight into crime and public safety issues in their communities. As a result of these challenges, both in the United States and across Europe innovative and diverse initiatives have been developed—particularly at the local level—to promote ‘safe reporting’ of crime among irregular migrants, and in turn to ensure greater access to justice for victims.4 In particular, many localities have developed what are commonly referred to as ‘firewall policies’.

Oxford, UK; COMPAS, Global Exchange on Migration and Diversity, 2019. 46p.

Edited by Carol Hagemann-White, Liz Kelly and Thomas Meysen

This book offers insights and perspectives from a study of “Cultural Encounters in Intervention Against Violence” (CEINAV) in four EU-countries. Seeking a deeper understanding of the underpinnings of intervention practices in Germany, Portugal, Slovenia and the United Kingdom, the team explored variations in institutional structures and traditions of law, policing, and social welfare. Theories of structural inequality and ethics are discussed and translated into practice.

Leverkusen-Opladen, Verlag Barbara Budrich, 2019. 320p.

Edited by Veronika Bezinsky, Andrada Filip, Luma Kamel, Claire Laurent, Saide Mobayed, Kathryn Platzer, Michael Platzer

FEMICIDE Volume 6: Violence Against Girls contains the speeches delivered at these side events, at which high-ranking officials and experts on GBV presented comprehensive ways of reducing the risk of such violence, increasing the quality of protection for girl victims, and ending the impunity for perpetrators. It also includes the most recent and most effective prevention and mitigation strategies on gender-based violence against underage girls. In this volume of FEMICIDE we pay particular attention to girl refugees, displaced girls and migrant children, and the specific forms of violence and abuse occurring in the context of their flight. The refugee and migration flows in 2015 and 2016 have often been accompanied by abuses of the rights of children, and girls in particular. In such extreme situations as armed conflict, natural disasters, and other emergencies, girls are especially vulnerable to forced marriage, sexual exploitation, trafficking, psychological and physical intimidation, during all stages of their displacement. As girls are the most vulnerable of the vulnerable and are less likely to seek protection and a remedy, this publication focuses specifically on transnational aspects of violence against children, which are often neglected.

Vienna: Academic Council on the United Nations System (ACUNS) Vienna Liaison Office, 2016. 78p.

Edited by Helen Hemblade

Although violence against and murder of older women is a widespread phenomenon across the world, it receives little targeted attention. The simple fact that women get older than men, and as a result must live alone longer, makes them more vulnerable to exploitation, fraud, robbery and even physical abuse. As such, the abuse and femicide of older women is one of the most widespread unpunished crimes, affecting women of all backgrounds, cultures and countries. In many societies, elderly widows are physically and mentally abused, robbed of their right to inherit their assets - eventually losing their societal status. Due to poor education and no independent income, they are financially insecure and dependent on their children or relatives. FEMICIDE Volume VIII aims to analyse the ways in which women, over the age of 55, are psychologically and physically mistreated all around the globe, often resulting in death.

Vienna: Academic Council on the United Nations System (ACUNS) Vienna Liaison Office. 2017. 80p.

By Hannah Ford

Until recently, the topic of female sexual offenders remained under-researched, and many incorrect assumptions and beliefs still surround the subject. This book is organised into five parts around eleven chapters. It provides a comprehensive overview of the latest research in this often overlooked area and discusses both adult female offenders and adolescents/younger children who commit sexual offences against children. After an in-depth evaluation of research literature, the author then considers a range of treatment approaches and directions for future research.

Chichester, West Sussex, UK: John Wiley & Sons, 2006. 204p.

By Alyson Brown and David Barrett

This book aims to document and analyse the enduring involvement of children in the commercial sex trade in twentieth-century England. It uncovers new evidence to indicate the extent of under-age prostitution over this period, a much-neglected subject despite the increased visibility of children more generally. The authors argue that child prostitution needs to be understood within a broader context of child abuse,<span class='showMoreLessContentElement' style='display: none;'> and that this provides one of the clearest manifestations of the way in which 'deviant groups' can be conceived of as both victims and threats. The picture of child prostitution which emerges is one of exclusion from mainstream society and the law, and remoteness from the agencies set up to help young people in trouble, which were often reluctant to accept the realities of child prostitution. The evidence provided in this book indicates that the circumstances which have led young people into prostitution over the last hundred years amount, at worst, to physical or psychological abuse or neglect, and at best as the result of limited choice.

Abingdon, O xon ; New York: Routledge, 2013. 223p. (Originally published by Willan, 2002)

By Diana Lopez-Avila

This paper aims at shedding light on the relationship between women's empowerment and domestic violence. For this, we explore different ways to measure women's empowerment and domestic violence, and analyze whether the relation depends on the definitions used. We take advantage of a rich data set collected in rural Colombia, including several measures of self-esteem, disagreement towards domestic violence, participation in household decisions and social capital; and analyze the relationship with both aggressive and controlling ways of domestic violence. The results indicate that the different measures of women's empowerment help explain much better the aggressive ways of domestic violence than the controlling ones. Our results show a positive correlation between women's empowerment and domestic violence. This goes in line with the theories that argue that men use violence as a way to leverage their power within the household. Among the different latent measures of women's empowerment we used, we found that social capital and self-esteem are significantly correlated with aggressive domestic violence. We do not find that more common proxies, such as women's participation in household decisions, are significantly correlated to domestic violence.

Paris: Paris School of Economics, 2015. 42p.

By Aurélien Dasre , Angela Greulich, Inan Ceren

This paper identifies motors and barriers for combatting domestic violence against women in Turkey – a country where modernism and conservatism are in constant interplay. We combine information from the Demographic Health Surveys and the Turkish Domestic Violence Survey and distinguish between controlling behavior, physical and sexual violence. Our empirical analysis tests how far a woman's intra-household decision making power (as measured by her education, her activity status, her income etc.) bears the potential to reduce her risk of experiencing domestic violence in Turkey. The analysis takes into account contextual factors as well as partner and household characteristics. We find that women's participation in the labor market does not, on its' own, reduce women's risk of experiencing intimate partner violence, but an egalitarian share of economic resources between spouses in likely to protect women against domestic violence. This finding has two important implications: First, higher education enabling women to access formal wage employment allows women not only to gain economic independence, but also to freely choose their partner. Second, unstable economic conditions that harm earning opportunities for men are an important risk factor for couples to experience conflits that can result in domestic violence against women. Against the background of the recent economic crisis that comes hand in hand with a backlash of gender and family norms in Turkey, our results highlight the need of policy action in this field.

Paris: University of Paris, Maison des Sciences Économiques, 2017. 37p.

By Chandre Gould

In this monograph, readers will meet some of the men who are responsible for violent crime in South Africa. The narratives presented here are based on interviews with men who have been incarcerated for murder, robbery and rape. These accounts show that the foundation for their criminal careers was laid early in their lives and compounded by their experiences of loss, abuse and alienation. Readers are taken on a journey through their lives to understand why crime in South Africa is so violent, and what needs to be done to prevent it.

Pretoria, South Africa: Institute for Security Studies, 2017. 144p.

By Human Rights Watch

On April 7, 2016, soon after the end of evening prayers, Sadia, 27, heard her husband calling her to come down to the street. As she got to the door, however, he stood flanked by two men, blocking the exit. On her husband’s order, his companions doused her with nitric acid. “My husband stood watching as my dress fell straight off and my necklace and earrings melted into my skin,” Sadia said. After four surgeries and almost four months at Dhaka Medical College Hospital, Sadia lost both her left ear and left eye. “He was trying to kill me,” she said when Human Rights Watch met her a year later. Acid attacks are one particularly extreme form of violence in a pattern of widespread gender-based violence targeting women and girls in Bangladesh. In fact, many of the women interviewed for this report endured domestic violence, including beatings and other physical attacks, verbal and emotional abuse, and economic control, for months or even years leading up to an attack with acid. For instance, during the 12 years that Sadia was married before the acid attack, her husband beat her regularly and poured chemicals in her eyes three times, each time temporarily blinding her.

New York: HRW, 2020. 73p.

By Human Rights Watch

In 2017, a US Border Patrol agent kneed a woman in the lower pelvis, leaving bruises and pain days later, according to her statement to a government official screening her asylum claim. In a separate incident that year, a Border Patrol agent or Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officer forced a girl to undress and then inappropriately touched her. In 2018, a CBP officer hit another asylum applicant so hard he was knocked unconscious and suffered brain swelling. That same year, an officer wearing a green uniform, consistent with those of the Border Patrol, asked an asylum applicant to give him oral sex in exchange for being released from custody. Another asylum applicant was bitten in the testicle by a Border Patrol service dog and denied medical treatment for about one month and ultimately had to have his testicle surgically removed. In 2019, CBP officials appeared to withhold food from a man in a freezing cold holding facility until he agreed to sign a paper that he did not understand. These are just some of the allegations of abuse catalogued in internal US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) reports received by Human Rights Watch on September 24, 2021 via the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).

New York: HRW, 2021. 103p.

By Human Rights Watch

The Cameroon report, “‘Everyone Wants Me Dead’: Killings, Abductions, Torture, and Sexual Violence Against LGBT People by Armed Groups in Iraq,” documents cases of attempted murder of LGBT people by armed groups primarily within the Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF), which are nominally under the prime minister’s authority.

New York: HRW, 2022. 115p.