Adolescent girls are at an increased risk of sexual violence, abuse, exploitation, and forced or early marriage across humanitarian contexts. In the past few years, prominent initiatives, organizations, and working groups have started to highlight the targeted needs and issues facing adolescent girls and have developed programmatic responses such as safe spaces for adolescent girls to protect and empower girls and reduce their vulnerabilities to violence or exploitation. A systematic review of academic and grey literature was conducted in September 2015 to examine the evidence base for programming that seeks to reduce violence against adolescent girls in humanitarian contexts. The authors used a Boolean search procedure to find and review 5830 records from academic journal databases, resource-hosting websites and relevant organizational websites. The inclusion criteria left us with three adolescent girl program evaluations from humanitarian settings to examine, all of which were pre/post-test evaluations that looked at changes in indicators such as social assets, self-esteem, decision making, livelihood skills and financial assets, gender norms, and feelings of safety. While these three evaluations showed promising results, overall, this systematic review demonstrates a significant gap in currently available rigorous research. Evidence is urgently needed to guide programming decisions to ensure that the emerging programs provide the level and depth of protection that adolescent girls need in humanitarian settings.
African-American youth are disproportionately affected by parental incarceration and the consequences of parental substance use. Many adapt to the loss of their parents to prison or drug addiction by engaging in sex-risk behavior, particularly the sex trade. These youth may engage in this risky behavior for a number of reasons. Although previous research has examined this issue, most of these studies have focused on runaway or street youth or youth in international settings. Empirical evidence on correlates of trading sex for money among urban African-American youth is practically missing. Using a sample of 192 African-American youth living in urban public housing, this paper attempts to rectify this gap in knowledge by assessing how individual and parental factors are related to the likelihood of a youth trading sex for money. The sample for this study reported a mean age of 19; 28 % reported having traded sex for money; 30 % had a father currently in prison; and 7 % reported having a mother currently in prison. Maternal incarceration and paternal substance use were associated with a higher likelihood of trading sex for money. Given the potential health risks associated with trading sex for money, understanding correlates of this behavior has important implications for the health of this vulnerable population of youth and urban health in general.
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