Factoring in Family: Considerations of Parenthood in the Assessment, Enforcement, and Collection of Legal Financial Obligations (LFOs).

Prior research has yet to address how criminal legal system actors take parenthood into account when imposing and enforcing LFOs. Drawing on evidence from 205 semi-structured interviews conducted across four states, this study explores the relationship between monetary punishment and parenthood from the perspectives of court and community corrections professionals. Engaging Kathleen Daly's framework of familial paternalism (1987a, 1987b, 1989a, 1989b), we find that system actors obtain and interpret information about defendant circumstances to (1) consider family complexity, (2) construct deservingness and (3) curb spill-over punishment. Ultimately, we find that system actors consider parental status in relation to LFOs and defendants' ability to pay, though their decisions also hinge on gender and the nature of parental involvement.

Measure of Personal Network Size Using the Known Population Method: A Methodological Guide.

The network scale-up method (NSUM) has shown promise in measuring the prevalence of hidden public health problems and at-risk populations. The technique involves asking survey respondents how many people they know with the health problem or characteristic of interest and extrapolating this information to the population level. An important component of the NSUM estimate is the size of each respondent's network, which is determined by asking respondents about the number of people they know who belong to populations of known size. There is little systematic discussion, however, to guide selection of these questions. Furthermore, many of the most commonly used known population questions are appropriate only in countries with a robust data infrastructure. Here, we draw from the NSUM literature to present a set of best practices in the selection of NSUM known population questions. Throughout, we address the unique situations that many researchers face in collecting prevalence data in the developing world, where innovative prevalence estimation techniques, such as NSUM, are most needed. (Am J Public Health. 2022;112(5):747-753. https://doi.org/10.2105/AJPH.2022.306731).

Violence Increases Psychological Distress Among Women Trafficking Survivors in Ghana.

Human trafficking is a crime that is often shaped by violence, particularly for women who are trafficked. Additionally, trafficking survivors often report severe psychological distress, though research on the causes of this psychological distress is lacking, as there is little longitudinal data available on trafficking survivors. Informed by past literature on the links between violence and mental health among other traumatized groups of women, we investigate how experiences of violence influence posttraumatic stress, depression, and suicide ideation among a unique longitudinal sample of 116 labor-trafficked women in Ghana. We find that experiencing sexual violence while being trafficked is associated with higher levels of both depression and posttraumatic stress years after the trafficking period ended. This indicates both the long-term effects of stress and the enduring nature of psychological distress among the women in this study. Our analytic account of how violent experiences while trafficked impact mental health over the period of reintegration contributes to the general literature on violence and mental health among women, as well as to literature on the health implications of human trafficking.

A Review of Prevalence Estimation Methods for Human Trafficking Populations.

Human trafficking has long-lasting implications for the well-being of trafficked people, families, and affected communities. Prevention and intervention efforts, however, have been stymied by a lack of information on the scale and scope of the problem. Because trafficked people are mostly hidden from view, traditional methods of establishing prevalence can be prohibitively expensive in the recruitment, participation, and retention of survey participants. Also, trafficked people are not randomly distributed in the general population. Researchers have therefore begun to apply methods previously used in public health research and other fields on hard-to-reach populations to measure the prevalence of human trafficking. In this topical review, we examine how these prevalence methods used for hard-to-reach populations can be used to measure the prevalence of human trafficking. These methods include network-based approaches, such as respondent-driven sampling and the network scale-up method, and venue-based methods. Respondent-driven sampling is useful, for example, when little information about the trafficked population has been produced and when an adequate sampling frame does not exist. The network scale-up method is unique in that it does not target the hidden population directly. The implications of our work internationally include the need for documenting and validating the various prevalence estimation methods in the United States in a more robust way than was done in existing efforts. In providing this roadmap for estimating the prevalence of human trafficking, our overarching goal is to promote the equitable treatment and overall well-being of the socially disadvantaged populations who disproportionately experience human trafficking.

Violence predicts physical health consequences of human trafficking: Findings from a longitudinal study of labor trafficking in Ghana.

Research consistently finds high rates of both poor physical health and violent victimization among survivors of human trafficking. While this literature documents the immediate effects of human trafficking on health, no published literature has compared short- and longer-term physical health consequences of trafficking or examined the role of violence in shaping physical health outcomes across the period of reintegration. Here, we utilize longitudinal data to document the prevalence of various forms of violence experienced by women and girls trafficked for labor in Ghana, as well as examine the effects of violence on self-reported physical health conditions at two time points following exit from trafficking. Consistent with the stress process model, we find a higher prevalence of physical health complaints during the second wave of data collection, suggesting a delayed somatization effect. We also find that while psychological violence has a strong effect on the number of physical health complaints in the period immediately after exit from trafficking, sexual violence experienced while being trafficked is most predictive of physical health complaints later in the reintegration period. These findings have implications for understanding the role of violence, more generally, in shaping physical health. Our research also suggests the importance of monitoring the physical health of trafficking survivors beyond the immediate post-trafficking period and of providing on-going access to healthcare.