Anti-Human Trafficking Interagency Collaboration in the State of Michigan: An Exploratory Study

2016 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 156-174 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tonisha R. Jones ◽  
Faith E. Lutze
2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (5) ◽  
pp. 157
Author(s):  
Elene Lam ◽  
Elena Shih ◽  
Katherine Chin ◽  
Kate Zen

Migrant Asian massage workers in North America first experienced the impacts of COVID-19 in the final weeks of January 2020, when business dropped drastically due to widespread xenophobic fears that the virus was concentrated in Chinese diasporic communities. The sustained economic devastation, which began at least 8 weeks prior to the first social distancing and shelter in place orders issued in the U.S. and Canada, has been further complicated by a history of aggressive policing of migrant massage workers in the wake of the war against human trafficking. Migrant Asian massage businesses are increasingly policed as locales of potential illicit sex work and human trafficking, as police and anti-trafficking initiatives target migrant Asian massage workers despite the fact that most do not provide sexual services. The scapegoating of migrant Asian massage workers and criminalization of sex work have led to devastating systemic and interpersonal violence, including numerous deportations, arrests, and deaths, most notably the recent murder of eight people at three Atlanta-based spas. The policing of sex workers has historically been mobilized along fears of sexually transmitted disease and infection, and more recently, within the past two decades, around a moral panic against sex trafficking. New racial anxieties around the coronavirus as an Asian disease have been mobilized by the state to further cement the justification of policing Asian migrant workers along the axes of health, migration, and sexual labor. These justifications also solidify discriminatory social welfare regimes that exclude Asian migrant massage workers from accessing services on the basis of the informality and illegality of their work mixed with their precarious citizenship status. This paper draws from ethnographic participant observation and survey data collected by two sex worker organizations that work primarily with massage workers in Toronto and New York City to examine the double-edged sword of policing during the pandemic in the name of anti-trafficking coupled with exclusionary policies regarding emergency relief and social welfare, and its effects on migrant Asian massage workers in North America. Although not all migrant Asian massage workers, including those surveyed in this paper, provide sexual services, they are conflated, targeted, and treated as such by the state and therefore face similar barriers of criminalization, discrimination, and exclusion. This paper recognizes that most migrant Asian massage workers do not identify as sex workers and does not intend to label them as such or reproduce the scapegoating rhetoric used by law enforcement. Rather, it seeks to analyze how exclusionary attitudes and policies towards sex workers are transferred onto migrant Asian massage workers as well whether or not they provide sexual services.


2016 ◽  
Vol 8 (4) ◽  
pp. 477-482 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chuo Yew Ting ◽  
Kah Seng Lee ◽  
Robin Tiow-Heng Tan ◽  
Wei Chern Ang ◽  
Long Chiau Ming
Keyword(s):  

2020 ◽  
pp. 1207-1221
Author(s):  
Carlos E. Jiménez-Gómez

Despite its origins, openness in the judiciary has expanded beyond transparency and, therefore, beyond the common law open justice principle. Several initiatives worldwide are echoing this trend and a new term, open judiciary, is arising as a way to address openness in the justice field. This chapter gives an overview of open judiciary initiatives worldwide, focusing on some of the most successful, in order to identify drivers of adoption, critical success factors, and preliminary results. The research is embedded in a broader exploratory study on the state of the art of open judiciary. The chapter is addressed to answer two of the research questions: What are some learning practices that can be identified worldwide in relation to openness in the judiciary? What are some of the most important lessons that can be learnt from these practices?


Author(s):  
Dilek Dede

The study mainly aims to understand the linkage between “blockchain” and “the regulatory function of governments”. The research questions are 1) How can be identified the blockchain as a concept and assessed the regulatory function of governments with the trust/compliance relationship? and 2) What extend the blockchain has affected the regulatory function of government, and how can be unveiled the relevance between the blockchain and the regulatory function of governments? In methodology, it is a theoretical and exploratory study. This study has constructed in three sections. In the first section, the conceptual aspects of blockchain have assessed. The second section is about the regulatory function of governments in the trust. The studies on “regulatory state” and “state-citizen relationship” have respectively scanned, and the virtues and drawbacks of blockchain have combined in terms of “trustless, privacy sensible organizational, public efficiency social impact.” Discussion and conclusion sections, the linkage between the blockchain and the regulatory function of the State is evaluated.


Author(s):  
Garrett Cullity

The term ‘moral judgement’ can refer to an activity, a state, a state-content, a capacity or a virtue. The activity of moral judgement is that of thinking about whether something has a moral attribute. The thing assessed might be an action, person, institution or state of affairs, and the attribute might either be general (such as rightness or badness) or specific (such as loyalty or injustice). If I engage in this activity and make up my mind, then the result will be the formation of a psychological state: the state of judging that the thing has the attribute. The state should then be distinguished from its content: what is judged by me, rather than my judging it. My psychological state of judging that human trafficking is wrong is a feature of me with a duration and location that depend on me. But the content of that state – the wrongness of human trafficking itself – is not a feature of me. Philosophers also frequently use ‘moral judgement’ to refer to a capacity: our alleged capacity ‘to go beyond the application of rules’ when we deliberate morally. And, going further, it can be used as a term of commendation, referring to a moral virtue (or set of virtues) that we might also call ‘moral discernment’ or ‘moral wisdom’, displayed when we exercise that capacity well. Someone with the virtue of moral judgement, it is often claimed, has an appropriate sensitivity to the way in which the individuality of a person or the particularity of a context can determine how it is right to act, think and feel – a sensitivity that cannot be captured in any general rule. Moral judgement in these various senses raises four main groups of philosophical questions. First, what kind of psychological state is the state of moral judgement? Is it, either wholly or in part, a belief, or is it some kind of noncognitive state? Secondly, what is required in order for a moral judgement-state, or the content of that state, to be justified? What kind of support do moral judgements require? Thirdly, how ought the activity of moral judgement to be conducted? In particular, what role within this activity is properly played by the application of rules? Do we need a capacity that goes beyond rule-application? And, fourthly, what is it to possess the virtue of moral judgement?


2019 ◽  
Vol 83 (1) ◽  
pp. 39-54 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shahrzad Fouladvand ◽  
Tony Ward

This article looks at human trafficking from a perspective influenced by the ‘vulnerability theory’ developed by Martha Fineman and her associates. It draws particularly on empirical studies of human trafficking from Albania to the UK and elsewhere. It suggests that Fineman’s approach needs to be modified to see the state not only as ameliorating vulnerability, or failing to do so, but as actively creating and using vulnerability to control or exploit its population. The fact that people are placed, for political, social and economic reasons, in situations of heightened vulnerability does not of itself deprive them of agency or responsibility. People should, however, be understood as ‘vulnerable subjects’ whose capacity for autonomy may be lost when they are deprived of supportive social relationships. The implications of this view for the criminal responsibility of trafficking victims are explored.


2019 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 59-62
Author(s):  
Whitney Fear

Human trafficking emerged as a serious social issue in North Dakota during the Bakken oil field boom in the western part of the state. The oil industry has seen a dramatic decrease in production in recent years. However, the presence of human trafficking continues to dominate the scene in the state. As the RN Case Manager and Community Outreach Nurse for a Healthcare for the Homeless grantee clinic in Fargo, the author is the only nurse outside of a traditional environment who works with victims of trafficking in the largest metropolitan area of North Dakota. The majority of the current targets for this heinous industry are young Native American women. The author, a Lakota woman, employs an approach with trafficking victims that seeks to reestablish the view of self as a being with significant value and ability to contribute to the world in a way that no other being can. In advocacy, she teaches professionals about the Lakota view of the Earth as a living being whose destruction may be correlated with the increased violence against women.


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