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9 Health & Just. 1 (2021)

handle is hein.journals/hlthjs9 and id is 1 raw text is: Cook et al. Health and Justice (2021) 9:1 https://doi.org/1 0.1186/s40352-020-00127-1 Health and Justice A longitudinal study of justice characteristics among girls participating in a sex trafficking court program Mekeila C. Cook , Ryan D. Talbert2 and Breanna Thomas3 Abstract Background: Sex trafficking is a public health and social justice issue that has traditionally been addressed with criminal justice solutions. Because many sex trafficking survivors are incarcerated for crimes related to their exploitation, specialty, human trafficking courts were developed to offer resources and assistance to labor and sex trafficking survivors. This study assessed justice-involved youth participating in a specialty, anti-trafficking court program. The purpose of this study was to investigate justice-related outcomes of participants in a specialty court program. We examined: (1) the relationship between age at first citation and justice characteristics (number of bench warrants, number of citations, number placements, and number of times ran away); and (2) the number of months between first citation and enrollment into the program with the aforementioned justice characteristics. We used negative binomial models to estimate the relationships between age at first citation, number of months between first citation and program enrollment, with the four justice characteristics (n = 181). Results: Adjusted models showed that younger age at first citation was associated with significantly more bench warrants and citations while in the program. Likewise, fewer months between first citation and program entry was related to more bench warrants and citations. Conclusions: There is a need to evaluate the appropriateness of specialty, trafficking court programs in reducing continued justice involvement and these programs ability to meet the evolving needs of sex trafficking survivors over time. We recommend universal screening for trafficking indicators for all systems-involved youth and relocating trafficking specialty courts out of juvenile courts to dependency courts. Keywords: Commercial sexual exploitation, Sex trafficking, Juvenile justice It is estimated that between 4500 to 21,000 adolescents and young adults are involved in the sex trade each year in the United States (Swaner, Labriola, Rempel, Walker, & Spadafore, 2016). Traditionally, these youth have been viewed as teen prostitutes and treated accordingly by law enforcement and juvenile courts. Being criminalized for their abuse, these youth are processed through the justice system for reasons directly connected to their * Correspondence: mcook@mmc.edu 'Division of Public Health Practice, Meharry Medical College, 1005 Dr. DB Todd Blvd., Nashville, TN 37209, USA Full list of author information is available at the end of the article BMC sexual exploitation (e.g., prostitution) as well as in- directly for related-offenses such as running away. Despite many efforts by child advocates to shift the re- sponse to sex trafficking from punitive to restorative, survi- vors of sex trafficking are still detained and incarcerated for offenses related to their exploitation. In response to the identification of trafficking survivors, the justice system seeks to address the illegal activities often associated with trafficking, while also providing services to survivors in an effort to reduce continued criminal behavior (Kendis, 2019; Musto, 2013). Thus, human trafficking courts were devel- oped following the model of other specialty programs, like © The Author(s). 2021 Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http//creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/.0/) applies to the data made available in this article. unless otherwise stated in a credit line to the data.

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