Contexts

While activists against human trafficking—the illegal trade of human beings mainly for the purposes of commercial sexual exploitation or forced labor—claim that it is one the most egregious forms of exploitation, scholars say that such claims are vastly overstated.

Sociologist Ronald Weitzer (Sex Trafficking and the Sex Industry: The Need for Evidence-Based Theory and Legislation, The Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, 2012) notes that dominant discourse, influenced by anti-trafficking activists, inaccurately presents human trafficking as a problem involving millions of victims, and that it makes sweeping generalizations about the individuals involved. But as criminal justice scholars Ko-Lin Chin and James Finckenauer (Selling Sex Overseas: Chinese Women and the Realities of Prostitution and Global Sex Trafficking, 2012) show, migrants’ degree of consent and knowledge of working conditions vary widely. What they have in common is the desire for upwardly mobility.

These and other scholars also challenge sinister caricatures of the trafficker, showing that many third-party recruiters and facilitators are parents, relatives, friends, and associates, and are not necessarily exploiting innocent victims.

While sex and labor trafficking can be coercive and highly exploitative economically, these more nuanced social science analyses can help policy analysts identify specific risk factors for genuine cases of victimization.

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In recent years there have been 17 incidents of school killings in the United States, resulting in 189 deaths, 280 injuries, and 11 suicides. The murder of school children is a growing social problem, as the recent tragedy in Newtown, Connecticut showed. Yet relatively little is known about the motives of those who kill children.

Criminologist Neil Websdale, who studied over 200 perpetrators who killed their own partners and children, provides one explanation. Using detailed materials provided by the Domestic Violence Fatality Review movement (a national group of volunteers which investigates incidents of domestic violence, interviewing police, surviving family members, and neighbors), Websdale found that a majority of the killings occurred in rages by men with a history of aggression. For a substantial minority of the killers, who were more middle class, there was no prior history of violence, and these murders were often carefully premeditated.

Websdale shows that rage is often a way of hiding shame and humiliation. Losing a job, for example, can lead to feelings of unbearable humiliation. His findings strongly support the thesis that secret shame is an important, underappreciated cause of violence—including violence against children.

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Violent death is so commonplace in Philadelphia that it infuses the visual culture of the city with haunting imagery. Sociologist James Dickinson shows how memorial portraits, roadside shrines, sidewalk plaques, murals, billboards, and graffiti variously recall, memorialize, criticize, or comment on the epidemic of lethal violence in the City of Brotherly Love.

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Further Reading

• #GunCrisis: Philadelphia, a site focused on Philadelphia gun violence.
• Mural Arts Program
• Anti-Violence Partnership of Philadelphia
• Moms Against Guns
• Mothers in Charge
• Center for Non-Violence and Social Justice, Drexel University School of Public Health
• Heeding God's Call

Sociologist Victor M. Rios shows in his study how some young men make trouble as means of gaining respect. This is an adaptation from his book Punished: Policing the Lives of Black and Latino Boys.

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An interview with Tia Palermo, a professor of preventive medicine at Stony Brook University Medical Center. Palermo used population-based data to better understand the occurrence of sexual violence in Congo. Palermo talks about how the magnitude of sexual violence is higher than previous studies suggest and also offers insight on the geographic spread of such violence.

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Contradictory views of addiction as both sickness and moral failing have resulted in a broken system in which famous substance users (like their everyday counterparts) are bounced between overcrowded jails, prisons, and rehab centers, all with little expectation of “success.”

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Photographers document Philadelphia’s “stop-snitching” code, a response to the realities of impoverished Philadelphia neighborhoods that includes the necessity of the drug economy.

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The dramatic expansion of prisons in the United States receives serious sociological investigation in two books that reflect on the decivilizing force of mass incarceration: Prison Profiteers: Who Makes Money from Mass Incarceration, edited by Tara Herivel and Paul Wright, and The Prisoners’ World: Portraits of Convicts Caught in the Incarceration Binge, by William Tregea and Marjorie Larmour.

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TV shows have piqued public interest in forensic work and how crime is done. But the attention hasn’t necessarily been good for those who work with corpses in real life. Medical examiners’ daily work remains mundane, misunderstood, and underappreciated.

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