Living with Commercial Sex

This chapter focuses on the experience of living in towns and cities in the late imperial period, when prostitution was a visible component of urban life. It examines the different unsuccessful policies employed by the imperial state to enforce the spatial segregation of registered prostitutes and attempts to render brothels invisible on the urban landscape. Official efforts to push lower-class sexuality to the spatial margins are also addressed, particularly policies of zoning and brothel ranking. Some landlords frequently complained to the police about the negative impact of nearby brothels on their rental prices, whereas others helped women who sold sex to resist some of the residency restrictions placed upon them by the police. Ultimately, officialdom’s attempts to limit the visibility of prostitution were spectacularly unsuccessful, as commercial sex was visible everywhere across the Empire’s towns and cities at the turn of the twentieth century.

Educational gaps and their impact on Iraqi refugee students’ secondary schooling in the Greater Detroit, Michigan Area

In this piece we examine educational gaps among Iraqi refugee students while living in Iraq and while in transitional countries, challenges resulting from those educational gaps since they have arrived in the United States, and Iraqi students’ needs to overcome their challenges for school adjustment. Thirty Chaldean Iraqi refugees who attended various high schools in the greater Detroit area, their parents, and their teachers participated in interviews and focus groups. Educational gaps in Iraq are due to precarious conditions involved in access to schooling, and threats and dangers experienced as Chaldean religious minorities. Gaps in transitional countries are due to lack of access to schooling due to residency restrictions, discriminatory treatment, and financial difficulties. Iraqi students are highly anxious about academic failure and their ability to obtain a high school diploma. We recommend educational policies and practices that might best address the serious problem of educational gaps.

Sex Panic and Denial

The American criminal justice system regarding sex is not just logically incoherent, it is also often morally bankrupt because it remains unexamined and poorly understood. This Article contends that there are actually common roots underlying the seemingly oppositional forces of social panic and denial, which explain why the United States has an endemic sexual violence problem. Both panic and denial reinforce the implicit, and sometimes explicit, desire to avoid substantive engagement with socially contentious issues related to sex. The use of residency restrictions and civil commitment fit the modern social goal of putting sex offenders out-of-sight and out-of-mind. Yet, those same desires also explain America’s unwillingness to believe victims of sexual violence and police failure to properly investigate criminal complaints. In this way, sex panic dovetails with sex denial—in both instances, American culture only permits a limited discussion and understanding of sex and sexual violence. The result is that our nation fails to take sex crime complaints seriously while overreacting to the few convictions that emerge from the hostile criminal justice system.

Restricting Russians: language and immigration laws in Soviet Latvia, 1956–1959

In 1956, a prominent faction within the leadership of Soviet Latvia, the Latvian national communists, launched two ambitious initiatives designed to redress perceived Stalinist Russification polices – a language law and residency restrictions. This article examines and evaluates these two policies and asks if they were part of a “Latvianization” program that deliberately targeted Russians for denial of residency permits and required Russians to gain Latvian-language competency within a two-year timeframe or face the threat of dismissal. In an effort to restore the primacy of the Latvian language, the national communists created a law enforcing knowledge of Latvian and Russian for Communist Party and government functionaries and service sector personnel. Using the Soviet legal system, the national communists also attempted to halt the influx of predominantly Slavic immigration to the Latvian capital, Riga. By instituting passport restrictions on settling in the city, the national communists sought to limit Slavic migration in order to maintain Riga's Latvian character and reduce pressure on the city's housing supply and municipal services. Existing studies deem passport restrictions in other Soviet cities a failure. The author argues, however, that the national communists’ scheme was generally successful, dramatically curbing migration to Riga during its operation.

The aftermath of sex offender registration and other controls

This essay begins with a review of public reaction to sexual offenses and the rise in social awareness that sex offenses have promoted. Statistics exploring the prevalence of sexual abuse in the United States and the United Kingdom will be given. As a result of a number of widely publicized sexual abuse cases (particularly child sexual abuse cases), a variety of laws applied to sexual offenders have been enacted from 1990 to 2010. Although different, these policies tend to center around four common themes: sex offender registration and notification, civil commitment, residency restrictions, and risk assessment. The essay examines these legislative efforts to assess their effectiveness at reducing sexually offensive behaviors and discusses the controversies surrounding such legislation.

What Predicts Where Sex Offenders Live? An Examination of Census Tract Data in Minnesota

Communities across the United States have become increasingly concerned over the presence of sex offenders in their neighborhoods. The purpose of this research is to examine the factors that are associated with the concentration of sex offenders in a large geographic area with few residency restrictions. This research also examines multiple categories of sex offenders subject to varying levels of community notification, allowing for an assessment of what, if any, effect community notification has on the residential patterns of sex offenders. Concentrated disadvantage, concentrated affluence, and housing affordability are all significant factors in explaining the concentration of multiple categories of sex offenders. Concentrated affluence relative to poverty is the most consistent predictor of sex offender concentration, revealing that more affluent communities ward off sex offender residents, regardless of community notification requirements.