Structural Vulnerability and Sexual Exploitation in Japan

Lost lives and opportunities for the legacy of harm reduction in Scotland, UK

The term “harm reduction” has been used as a label for certain policies and programs in the field of illicit drugs for many years, but there has never been a universal definition for the term or unanimous consensus on how the term should be used. Some proponents argue that harm reduction must be a movement that challenges traditional drug laws, while others believe that harm reduction should chiefly be a public health approach that aims to improve the overall health of drug users. Some scholars hail harm reduction for taking an amoral and value-neutral position towards drug use, while others criticize it for devaluing human rights and perpetuating the marginalization of drug users. Drawing on Foucault’s framework of governmentality, Petersen and Lupton’s (1996) concept of the “new public health,” and Goffman’s (1963) theories on stigma, this research investigates the types of claims and arguments that InSite—Canada’s only supervised injection site and perhaps its most recognized harm reduction program—uses in its website and press releases to characterize and justify its services. Three news articles from The Vancouver Sun are also examined for a comparison of the complexities and diverse viewpoints that often arise in descriptions and defenses of harm reduction, supervised injection service, and illicit drug use.

The term “harm reduction” has been used as a label for certain policies and programs in the field of illicit drugs for many years, but there has never been a universal definition for the term or unanimous consensus on how the term should be used. Some proponents argue that harm reduction must be a movement that challenges traditional drug laws, while others believe that harm reduction should chiefly be a public health approach that aims to improve the overall health of drug users. Some scholars hail harm reduction for taking an amoral and value-neutral position towards drug use, while others criticize it for devaluing human rights and perpetuating the marginalization of drug users. Drawing on Foucault’s framework of governmentality, Petersen and Lupton’s (1996) concept of the “new public health,” and Goffman’s (1963) theories on stigma, this research investigates the types of claims and arguments that InSite—Canada’s only supervised injection site and perhaps its most recognized harm reduction program—uses in its website and press releases to characterize and justify its services. Three news articles from The Vancouver Sun are also examined for a comparison of the complexities and diverse viewpoints that often arise in descriptions and defenses of harm reduction, supervised injection service, and illicit drug use.

The term “harm reduction” has been used as a label for certain policies and programs in the field of illicit drugs for many years, but there has never been a universal definition for the term or unanimous consensus on how the term should be used. Some proponents argue that harm reduction must be a movement that challenges traditional drug laws, while others believe that harm reduction should chiefly be a public health approach that aims to improve the overall health of drug users. Some scholars hail harm reduction for taking an amoral and value-neutral position towards drug use, while others criticize it for devaluing human rights and perpetuating the marginalization of drug users. Drawing on Foucault’s framework of governmentality, Petersen and Lupton’s (1996) concept of the “new public health,” and Goffman’s (1963) theories on stigma, this research investigates the types of claims and arguments that InSite—Canada’s only supervised injection site and perhaps its most recognized harm reduction program—uses in its website and press releases to characterize and justify its services. Three news articles from The Vancouver Sun are also examined for a comparison of the complexities and diverse viewpoints that often arise in descriptions and defenses of harm reduction, supervised injection service, and illicit drug use.

Policy actor views on structural vulnerability in harm reduction and policymaking for illegal drugs: A qualitative study.

'Harm reduction' aims to reduce the health, social and economic costs of legal and illegal psychoactive drugs without necessarily reducing their consumption. For many decades the conventional approach to illicit drugs emphasized the elimination of consumption regardless of consequences. But the global drug market still continued to grow and become more dangerous. In many countries, deaths, disease, crime, corruption and violence soared. Harm reduction, for long a standard approach in public health and many other fields, attracted increasing interest in the 1980s after the recognition that HIV spreading among people who inject drugs represented a severe threat to the general population. Harm reduction measures in many countries easily controlled this problem. In contrast to supply control dominated approaches, many harm reduction interventions have been shown to be effective, safe and cost-effective. Harm reduction approaches to alcohol in licensed premises include the replacement of glass with shatterproof plastic drinking vessels and the use of furniture too heavy to lift. Harm reduction approaches to tobacco include nicotine replacement and e-cigarettes. The academic debate over harm reduction is now over. By 2012, 93 countries had accepted harm reduction. Japan remains one of the diminishing few countries still resistant to harm reduction. Language: en

Climate change presents an unprecedented threat to human rights, disproportionately affecting marginalized communities and exacerbating global inequality. This study explores the conceptualization of environmental justice as a human right and examines the legal tools available to ensure climate accountability at domestic, regional, and international levels. The research aims to highlight how a rights-based approach can reinforce climate governance and empower vulnerable populations through access to justice, legal remedies, and participatory frameworks. Adopting a doctrinal methodology, this study reviews constitutional provisions, international treaties, judicial decisions, and climate litigation trends to evaluate the effectiveness of current legal mechanisms. Key findings indicate that while several legal avenues such as environmental constitutionalism, human rights litigation, and international soft law offer potential for enforcing environmental justice, their practical impact is limited by enforcement gaps, jurisdictional constraints, and power asymmetries. Nonetheless, emerging jurisprudence and legal innovations show promise in bridging these gaps. The study concludes that recognizing environmental justice as a fundamental human right and strengthening legal accountability mechanisms are essential steps toward achieving climate justice and ensuring equitable environmental protection for present and future generations. Environmental justice has emerged as a crucial dimension of human rights discourse in the era of climate crisis. As climate change disproportionately affects marginalized and vulnerable populations, the demand for legal mechanisms to hold polluters accountable and protect communities has intensified. This article explores environmental justice as a fundamental human right and critically evaluates the legal tools available at domestic, regional, and international levels for enforcing climate accountability. It argues for a rights-based approach to climate governance, emphasizing legal empowerment, procedural safeguards, and judicial remedies as essential strategies for ensuring environmental justice.

Introduction. The article is devoted to the study of general prospects for the development of the human rights institution in conditions of global crises. Human rights in the modern civilized world are not only abstract universal values, the highest social value of the development of democratic, legal and social states, a key element of the stable and progressive functioning of society, but also an integral part of the process of implementing law as a whole. Global crises, which are accompanied by increased economic, political and social problems, usually lead to a temporary weakening of the mechanisms for the implementation and protection of human rights and freedoms. Such a situation requires the development and implementation of new mechanisms to counter the challenges and threats associated with the growing level of discrimination, violence and numerous violations of fundamental human rights and freedoms in these conditions. The aim of the article. The purpose of this article is to determine the general prospects for the development of the institution of human rights in the context of global crises and to develop basic recommendations for ensuring their effective implementation. Results. Various issues related to improving the institution of human rights in the context of modern global crises require the use of a considered, balanced approach, which should combine flexible, operational and to a certain extent universal mechanisms for their provision and protection, capable in their entirety to give a quick and qualitative responding to crisis situations in the relevant spheres and industries of public life, ensuring and protecting human rights in extraordinary conditions. The difficulty of creating such legal mechanisms is associated with a number of reasons, in particular with the existing differences between the global interests of the most developed states, their associations, transnational corporations and the interests of national cultural protectionism, the policy of which some modern states seek to implement, with the need to ensure a constant balance between human rights and security measures that restrict them, with the uneven application of international human rights standards at the national level, which is associated, among other things, with the non-acceptance of a number of modern human rights and freedoms by the socio-cultural traditions of development of many states, with the global crisis of social and individual moral consciousness, etc. Modern forms of law enforcement and human rights protection activities include appropriate digital platforms and social networks for the dissemination of certain information, consolidation of citizens and pressure on public authorities. In the context of modern crises, such technologies include platforms for monitoring compliance with human rights, collecting signatures, online appeals and petitions, etc. An important component of these innovations is also digital platforms for providing legal consulting, which can provide primary legal assistance to migrants, refugees, victims of hostilities or environmental disasters, and other socially vulnerable segments of the population. Conclusions. The prospects for development of the human rights institution in the context of global crises are associated both with the implementation of further modernization of international and national human rights protection mechanisms (for example, improving the legal framework, increasing the level of legal awareness of the population, creating effective judicial and other human rights protection institutions, etc.), and with the implementation of a set of measures aimed at the formation and development of the moral consciousness of the individual, in particular a number of his moral qualities that ensure the natural unity of being (for example, conscience, benevolence, honesty, responsibility, loyalty, mercy, courage, moderation, hard work, etc.). It is the high level of public and individual moral consciousness that makes it impossible to formally, unscrupulously apply legal norms, various abuses and manipulations of their content in certain legal relations, and therefore is one of the main prerequisites and at the same time a guarantee of the real effectiveness of relevant law enforcement and human rights protection practices, the primary subject of which is always a person. Key words: human rights, global crises, mechanisms for ensuring and protecting human rights, state, legal norms, implementation of law.

OBJECTIVE: This study estimated the rates of sexual victimization among prison inmates with and without a mental disorder. METHODS: The study sampled inmates aged 18 or older in 13 prisons within a single mid-Atlantic state prison system (12 facilities for men and one for women). A total of 7,528 inmates completed the survey instrument, which was administered by audio-computer-assisted technology. Of the 6,964 male respondents, 58.5% were African American, 16.2% were non-Hispanic white, 19.8% were Hispanic, and 5.5% were of another race or ethnicity. Of the 564 female respondents, 48.4% were African American, 30.9% were non-Hispanic white, 14.4% were Hispanic, and 7.3% were of another race or ethnicity. Mental disorder was based on self-reported previous mental health treatment for particular mental disorders. Sexual victimization was measured by using questions adapted from the National Violence Against Women and Men surveys. RESULTS: Approximately one in 12 male inmates with a mental disorder reported at least one incident of sexual victimization by another inmate over a six-month period, compared with one in 33 male inmates without a mental disorder. Among those with a mental disorder, sexual victimization was three times as high among female inmates (23.4%) as among male inmates (8.3%). African-American and Hispanic inmates with a mental disorder, independent of gender, reported higher rates of sexual victimization than their non-Hispanic white counterparts. CONCLUSIONS: Prisons are hazardous places. Steps must be taken to protect inmates from predators inside prison, to screen them for posttraumatic stress disorder, to provide trauma-related treatment, and to keep them safe.

Drawing on a collaborative ethnographic study of the 2016 International Union for the Conservation of Nature World Conservation Congress (WCC), we analyze how Indigenous peoples and local community (IPLC) rights advocates have used a rights-based approach (RBA) to advance long-standing struggles to secure local communities' land and resource rights and advance governing authority in biodiversity conservation. The RBA has allowed IPLC advocates to draw legitimacy from the United Nations system—from its declarations to its special rapporteurs—and to build transnational strategic alliances in ways they could not with participatory discourses. Using it, they have brought attention to biodiversity as a basic human right and to the struggle to use, access, and own it as a human rights struggle. In this article, we show how the 2016 WCC provided a platform for building and reinforcing these alliances, advancing diverse procedural and substantive rights, redefining key principles and standards for a rights-based conservation approach, and leveraging international support for enforcement mechanisms on-the-ground. We argue that, as advocates staked out physical and discursive space at the venue, they secured the authority to shape conservation politics, shifting the terrain of struggle between strict conservationists and community activists and creating new conditions of possibility for advancing the human rights agenda in international conservation politics. Nonetheless, while RBAs have been politically successful at reconfiguring global discourse, numerous obstacles remain in translating that progress to secure human rights to resources "on the ground", and it is vital that the international conservation community finance the implementation of RBA in specific locales, demand that nation states create monitoring and grievance systems, and decolonize the ways in which they interact with IPLCs. Finally, we reflect on the value of the Collaborative Event Ethnography methodology, with its emphasis on capturing the mundane, meaningful and processual aspects of policymaking, in illuminating the on-going labor entailed in bringing together and aligning the disparate elements in dynamic assemblages.Keywords: Human rights, global conservation governance, collaborative event ethnography, Indigenous peoples

This chapter presents the concept of harm reduction (HR), which was developed in the 1980s in response to prevention issues related to the intravenous use of psychoactive substances. It became progressively integrated with the public health approach for addictive behaviours. In its current definitions, HR concerns the laws, programmes and practices principally aimed at reducing negative consequences associated with legal and illegal substance consumption, both in the health sector and socioeconomic levels, without necessarily reducing consumption itself. HR finds its legal grounding in constitutional and international law, particularly the international conventions on human rights. In terms of problem gambling, public policies have for a long time mirrored the efforts of operators as part of their corporate social responsibility, known generically as “responsible gambling”. This approach centres on providing information to players and applying limitation and exclusion measures. HR differs from “responsible gambling” in that it does not primarily focus on problem gambling, the preservation of interests of recreational players and the industry but on reducing the burden of problems upon society at-large and its citizens. This requires taking into account the conflict of interest resulting from the substantial contribution made by those who gamble excessively towards gambling revenue.

Problem setting. The current state of affairs in society requires increased attention to the protection of human and citizen rights and freedoms. Martial law, as a legal regime, causes significant changes in the functioning of state institutions and society in general, endangering the basic rights and freedoms of citizens. Under such circumstances, it is especially important to develop and implement innovative approaches to ensuring the protection of human rights, which would take into account the specifics of the state of war and, at the same time, act as guarantors of compliance with the basic principles of the rule of law. This requires not only the reform of the legislation, but also the introduction of new technologies and methods that will allow more effective protection of citizens’ rights even in difficult conditions. Innovative approaches should be based on an increased level of awareness and training of both state bodies and civil society regarding mechanisms for the protection of rights in wartime. Analysis of recent researches and publications. Important aspects of the issue of innovative approaches to the protection of human and civil rights and freedoms have been studied by R. Shai, S. Husarov, O. Gilyaka, V. Kovalenko. However, despite the considerable experience in this area, the issue of introducing innovations to protect human rights and freedoms has not been fully explored. Purpose of the research is a comprehensive study of the features of innovative approaches to the protection of human and citizen rights and freedoms under martial law. This involves an analysis of the latest technologies, legal mechanisms and organizational solutions that can be effectively used to protect civil rights in emergency situations. In addition, the article examines the challenges and prospects of implementing these innovative approaches in the context of Ukrainian realities, in particular, taking into account socio-economic and legal aspects. Article’s main body. The research materials are: 1) normative and legal support for the protection of human and citizen rights and freedoms under martial law, including international conventions, domestic laws and by-laws; 2) works of domestic and foreign authors who conduct scientific and practical research in the field of human rights, innovative technologies and methods of protecting rights in armed conflicts. In the research process, the following scientific methods were used: theoretical generalization and grouping – to characterize the components of the system of protection of human and citizen rights and freedoms in the conditions of martial law and functions related to ensuring security; the method of formalization, analysis and synthesis – for the study of the domestic and the needs for the protection of rights in the conditions of martial law; comparative analysis – to develop different strategies and approaches to the protection of human and citizen rights in the conditions of martial law. The generalization of the results was used to formulate conclusions and develop recommendations for improving the system of protection of rights and freedoms in similar conditions. Conclusions and prospects for the development. The protection of human rights under martial law is a complex and multifaceted task that requires an integrated approach, including legal, administrative and socio-economic processes. The war caused and continues to cause a lot of grief, destroying everything in its path, the most valuable of which is human life and health. The main goal currently remains the issue of effective protection of a person and a citizen from external dangers lurking in modern Ukrainian society. This study aims to analyze approaches to the protection of human rights under martial law, determine their effectiveness and outline ways of improvement. Special attention is paid to the study of international experience and the possibility of its adaptation to modern Ukrainian conditions. As a result, it is planned to develop recommendations for the implementation of innovative approaches that will contribute to strengthening the legal protection of citizens in the conditions of martial law, increasing the level of their security and well-being.

Long-term effects of incestuous child abuse in college women: social adjustment, social cognition, and family characteristics.

Sakran, Joseph V MD, MPH, MPA, FACS; Bornstein, Sue S MD, MACP; Dicker, Rochelle MD, FACS; Rivara, Frederick P MD, MPH, FAAP; Campbell, Brendan T MD, MPH, FACS, FAAP; Cunningham, Rebecca M MD, FACEP; Betz, Marian MD, MPH; Hargarten, Stephen MD, MPH; Williams, Ashley MD, FACS; Horwitz, Joshua M JD; Nehra, Deepika MD, FACS; Burstin, Helen MD, MPH, MACP; Sheehan, Karen MD, MPH; Dreier, Fatimah L; James, Thea MD, FACEP; Sathya, Chethan MD, MSCE; Armstrong, John H MD, FACS; Rowhani-Rahbar, Ali MD, MPH, PhD; Charles, Scott MAPP; Goldberg, Amy MD, FACS; Lee, Lois K MD, MPH, FAAP, FACEP; Stewart, Ronald M MD, FACS; Kerby, Jeffrey D MD, PhD, FACS; Turner, Patricia L MD, MBA, FACS; Bulger, Eileen M MD, FACS Author Information

El turismo sexual en la era de la globalización, la reducción de daños y la migración de enfermedades: un nuevo modelo conceptualObjetivoEste artículo contribuye a la literatura sobre el turismo sexual situándolo en el contexto contemporáneo de la globalización, la reducción de daños y la migración de enfermedades.Diseño/metodología/enfoqueEl documento adopta un enfoque de salud pública y ciencias sociales para delimitar el turismo sexual, basándose en las situaciones de los trabajadores del sexo y los turistas junto con las fuerzas globales, como la tecnología, los derechos humanos, la aplicación de la ley y la salud.ConclusionesSe presenta un nuevo modelo conceptual holístico que contiene asociaciones interactivas de varios niveles. Mientras que los niveles micro, contextual, meso y macro separados son versátiles, los responsables de la toma de decisiones y los profesionales estarán equipados para entender el turismo sexual en su totalidad.Originalidad/valorLa originalidad del artículo se encuentra en el modelo conceptual propuesto.Investigación