sex trafficking: Homeless teenage girl sitting near brick wall outdoors

Youth At Greater Risk For Being Sex Trafficked If Homeless, LGBTQ, Minority

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Sexual crimes are prevalent domestically and globally, and sex trafficking — people brokering other humans for sex — is no exception. Data suggest about 4.5 million people are currently trafficked, 945,000 of whom are children. Across the U.S., over 40% of cases investigated between 2008 and 2010 involved minors. 

The problem is widespread, but research has identified several common risk factors for domestic minor sex trafficking (DMST): age, ethnicity, sexuality and housing status. These risk factors are briefly elucidated here, and guide our recommendations for future research, practice and policy. Trafficking is defined as “recruitment, harboring, transportation, provision, or obtaining of a person for the purpose of a commercial sex act.” Further, a commercial sex act is “induced by force, fraud, or coercion, or in which the person induced to perform such an act has not attained 18 years of age,” so age is a critical aspect of DMST. 

In fact, DMST victims are often young.

peer-on-peer romantic young couple kissin

In Peer-on-peer Child Sexual Abuse, States Differ on Who’s a Peer

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The phrase “peer on peer child sexual abuse” is well known. It implies an exploitative sexual relationship of one minor by another. But who is a “peer”? From the Latin word par the term infers equality. A dictionary definition of the word “peer” as a noun is “a person of the same age, the same social position, or having the same abilities as other people in a group,” or “one that is of equal standing with another.” 

As applied to child sexual abuse, David Finkelhor posited in 1986 that the perpetrator and victim were peers if they were less than five years apart.

Child holds black lives matter sign

In Demanding Justice For Black People, Are We Sacrificing the Peace of Black Youth?

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We met at Freedom Plaza. This was my first protest since the killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. People of all ages, abilities, genders, races and ethnicities were there to stand up for justice. 

With an impassioned call to action from one of the organizers, the crowd headed toward Capitol Hill chanting, “No Justice, No Peace.” I fell in line toward the back, taking in the moment and the movement. 

As we walked, I noticed a dad and his son, no more than 3 or 4, walking with us. They were white. As the protest went on, the dad explained each chant to his son, encouraging him with the rhythm of the crowd.

Heroes Do Work In Detention Centers

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I'm a licensed clinical social worker providing behavioral health service in a juvenile detention center in a large urban area. My team is subcontracted to provide these services, so when the time came for organizations to scale back to essential services or essential employees only, we ended up shifting to remote work to limit the number of people going in and out of the detention center. With some trial and error and leaders coming together, we were able to adopt a telehealth platform in order to continue services to the best of our ability and to try to meet the needs of the detention center. From the provider side, we were able to say, “Sure, we can be flexible, we want to support the safety measures in place for the youth.” And I'm thinking to myself, when somebody says “We can be flexible” or “That's not a problem, we can try to meet the needs of whomever,” usually flexibility for our team means some sort of strain on somebody else. Essentially it transfers work to someone else to free up yourself to be flexible. 

Same with the center in this scenario.

homelessness: Fight Poverty Not the Poor protest

Opinion: Youth Homelessness Is a Symptom, Not a Cause

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(Series: Part 5 of 7)
Part 1: How Do We Make Youth Homelessness Effort Bipartisan? Part 2: America’s Biases Marginalize Youth, Drive Them to Homelessness
Part 3: Collective Decision-making Can Neutralize Politics of Fear
Part 4: So How Does This Collective Decision-making Work? Now that we have equalized the playing field among the political and ideological spectrum, let’s turn to two more groups of stakeholders that must be at the table and included in a governor’s executive order — advocacy groups and youth. 

In New Mexico, for example, the New Mexico Coalition to End Homelessness must be at the table. They are the largest advocacy group with a statewide network of programs and shelters having been advocating the longest. They are rich with knowledge and experience of the problem and the means to go about approaching it, but they need the backbone and support of the various state actors who can contribute collectively to build a much stronger network as well as a more formidable statewide approach.

juvenile records: word “criminal” in stack of papers

Juvenile Records Laws Must Be Reformed to Prevent Ongoing Racism

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The juvenile justice system was created 120 years ago to reform and rehabilitate “wayward” youth to ensure they had the opportunity to achieve productive futures. To this end, it was widely accepted that juvenile system involvement should remain confidential and that all records should be sealed or eradicated to ensure youth a clean slate upon reaching adulthood. Juvenile records laws were enacted to protect the privacy of system-involved youth. Today, however, the privacy protections afforded by juvenile records laws have hollowed out by loopholes and limitations that make confidentiality the exception more than the rule for many juvenile offenders. The broad accessibility permitted by juvenile records laws combined with technological innovation in data storage and mining make juvenile record information more available than ever.

probation officers: Close-up of angry man with smoke coming out from his ears

A Message to Probation Officers: Don’t Expect Youth to Show Up If You Don’t

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One of my favorite memes says, “Accountability feels like an attack when you’re not ready to acknowledge how your behaviors harm others.” Probation officers (POs) and youth share the responsibility for their own actions, as well as the actions of one another. Accountability isn’t easy, but it isn’t impossible. With POs modeling what it looks like to be accountable, it will set the example for youth to follow. Below I’ve narrowed it it down to three simple, but significant steps:
Show up
I had both a negative and positive experience with probation officers. The distinction between these two experiences was that my first PO only showed up for work, while my second PO (PO Choi) showed up to work and showed up for me.

collaboration: Group of people stand around table in dark blue room, one woman gesturing.

Opinion: So, How Does This Collective Decision-making Work?

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We described in the previous column how the approach is four-tiered, beginning with collaboration. Collaboration is a term that has been bantered about and unfortunately, in some circles, gotten a black eye. The truth is that there is a best practice to collaboration that many don’t follow, and so it fails. Not because the concept is bad; it’s the user who doesn’t know what they’re doing.

California: Young guy with stand-up locs outside

California Probation Can Handle COVID, Proposed Transition of High-needs Youth to Counties

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Probation in California has the responsibility of treating and supervising our community’s most high-needs and high-risk youth. We take our role in promoting healthy, prepared and positive adolescents seriously and provide each youth the supervision and support services they need to help guide them into adulthood.  

The use of individualized, evidence-based practices to advance the long-term well-being of youth is foundational to our work. We rely on practices and tools such as risk and needs-based assessments, cognitive development, counseling, therapy, and trauma-informed care and evidence-based supervision models. 

Our rehabilitative and health-centered focus has been proven successful. 

Since 2007, California’s juvenile justice system, led by local probation departments, has successfully decreased juvenile detention rates by 60% and juvenile arrest rates by 73%. In addition, we safely treat 90% of youth in the justice system in our communities, and have diverted nearly 67% of youth. When the COVID-19 pandemic arrived in California this year, county probation departments remained focused on keeping our youth safe both in the community and in our secure facilities while still creatively providing the supports and services each youth needed for stability and their individualized growth.

police: 2 lines of police facing right holding batons

Militarization of Police Must Be Changed to Guardian Training

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I have been researching and teaching about crime and justice for more than 40 years. My work has focused on the importance of race and social class in understanding the issues that people face in these systems. Within this broad area of concern is the relationship between the police and communities of color, especially Black communities. The use and abuse of force has been a constant throughout the history of this relationship. This was on full display when a video was released of the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis on May 25. Atrocities such as this one have been a regular occurrence in Black communities since there were organized police forces.