Through her own gripping story of escape from human trafficking, Rebecca Bender teaches us what trafficking in America looks like - and what we can do about it - as she reveals the light of God in even the darkest places. In Pursuit of Love is a riveting read that will give you the confidence to pursue your own purpose and take you on a journey to places you never thought possible.

Born and raised in a small Oregon town, all-American girl Rebecca Bender was a varsity athlete and honor roll student with a promising future. Then a predator pretending to be her boyfriend lured her into a web of lies that sent her down a path she never imagined possible.

For nearly six years, Rebecca was sold across the underground world of sex trafficking in Las Vegas. She was branded, beaten, told when to sleep and what to wear, and traded between traffickers. Forced into a dark sisterhood, Rebecca formed bonds with her trafficker and three other women, creating a false sense of family. During that time, God began revealing himself to her. And in the midst of her exploitation, she found the hope she needed to survive.

After a federal raid, Rebecca escaped. Her life was forever changed as she felt the embrace of her heavenly Father guiding her to healing and wholeness. Rebecca soon began to use her own experiences to change the lives of others as she went back into the darkest places she had known - assisting FBI, VICE, and law enforcement across the country in some of their most difficult cases.

Through Rebecca's incredible story of redemption, we remember that our past does not have to determine our destiny.

Prostitution, Trafficking, and Traumatic Stress offers the reader an analysis of prostitution and trafficking as organized interpersonal violence. Even in academia, law, and public health, prostitution is often misunderstood as sex work. The book's 32 contributors offer clinical examples, analysis, and original research that counteract common myths about the harmlessness of prostitution. Prostitution, Trafficking, and Traumatic Stress extensively documents the violence that runs like a constant thread throughout all types of prostitution, including escort, brothel, trafficking, strip club, pornography, and street prostitution. Prostitutes are always subjected to verbal sexual harassment and often have a lengthy history of trauma, including childhood sexual abuse and emotional neglect, racism, economic discrimination, rape, and other physical and sexual violence. International in scope, the book contains cutting-edge contributions from clinical experts in traumatic stress, from attorneys and advocates who work with trafficked women, adolescents, and children and also prostituted women and men. A number of chapters address the complexity of treating the psychological symptoms resulting from prostitution and trafficking. Others address the survivor's need for social supports, substance abuse treatment, peer support, and culturally relevant services. To stay up-to-date on this powerful subject, visit the Traffick Jamming blog at http://www.prostitutionresearch.com/blog. Prostitution, Trafficking, and Traumatic Stress examines: The connections between prostitution, incest, sexual harassment, rape, and domestic violence Clinical symptoms common among those in prostitution, including dissociation, posttraumatic stress disorder, depression, and substance abuse Peer support programs for women escaping prostitution Culturally relevant services for women escaping prostitution The connection between prostitution and trafficking, including trafficking from Mexico to the United States, and prostitution of adolescents in Cambodian brothels Online prostitution How gay male pornography harms gay men Accessing public assistance funds for survivors of prostitution Arguments against legalizing or decriminalizing prostitution From the editor's Preface: Prostitution is to the community what incest is to the family. Slavery, at its height, was normalized in the United States as unpleasant but inevitable, yet it is now considered to be an institution that violated human rights. Perhaps we will at some point in the future look back on prostitution/trafficking with a similar historical perspective. It is my hope that this book will assist the reader in understanding prostitution and trafficking and in how to help women and children escape it.

This is the second volume of Melvin Lasky's The Language of Journalism, praised as a "brilliant" and "original" study in communications and contemporary language, and as "a joy to read." It broke ground in focusing on the comparative styles and prejudices of mainstream American and British newspapers, and in its trenchant analysis of their systematic debasement in the face of obligatory platitudes and compulsory euphemisms. Lasky's subtle and richly detailed text documents the possibly terminal crisis affecting honest, thoughtful, and independent journalism in the Western world. It extends the research in his first volume, and deepens the interpretation. It also adds the personal touch of both wit and anecdote expressed by an experienced international journalist and historian. The central chapters on the "F-word" carry the public emergence of the infamous "expletive deleted" beyond the conventional lexicographer's approach. Lasky's pages on the use of formerly forbidden language is a triumph of sinuous semantics. Here, in incisive analysis, is the tortuous struggle of a once Puritanized literary culture writhing to break free of censorship and self-censorship. Lasky critically evaluates the historic effort of the avant-garde of "dirty realism" to find a path towards what he calls "a usable profanity." In the meantime, newspaper style books become comic texts, as asterisks take over from square brackets and millions of readers purse their lips and indulge in "participatory obscenity." In dealing fully with the phenomenon of profanity, the new book adds another dimension to Lasky's thesis on mass culture's trivialization of real social and political phenomena. It underscores as well oursociety's embrace of banality, in standardizing politically correct jargon, slang, patois, pidgin, and various other "grunts and growls." The reader of the first volume will find here a wholly new range of references to illuminate the detail of what our newspapers have been publishing, and how the alert and sophisticated reader can make sense of the realities they purport to represent.

Guns have never before been as important in American culture as they are at this moment. Most contemporary conversations on guns focus on either the gun as a tool used in mass killings or a right to be fiercely defended, with most debates deadlocking on the ultimate role of humans in causing gun violence-that, as the cliche goes, "Guns don't kill people; people kill people." And yet for all this attention, too much of the discussions on gun violence and gun control take the gun as passive object, ignoring the changing effects, and the very agency, that guns may deploy as politicized objects. The Lives of Guns offers a new and compelling way of thinking about the role of the gun in our social and political lives. In gathering ideas from science studies, law, sociology, and politics, each chapter turns the stale, standard gun conversations around by investigating the gun as a technology and thus as an object with its own power and agency. In approaching guns from a tech perspective, down to the very science of how they are created and how they fire, The Lives of Guns takes up a number of questions, such as: How does the presence of these specific objects shape civic ideology? What does it mean to develop and care for gun and gun accessories technology? What do guns mean to those who build them versus those who fight for-and against-them? What could happen when drone technology meets gun technology? In bringing together a great breadth of perspectives from leading lawyers, political scientists, and historians, The Lives of Guns promises to move the gun debate forward by opening up new ways of thinking about these issues, ultimately broadening our conception of what counts as an issue in these debates.

What is love's real aim? Why is it so ruthlessly selective in its choice of loved ones? Why do we love at all? In addressing these questions, Simon May develops a radically new understanding of love as the emotion we feel towards whomever or whatever we experience as grounding our life-as offering us a possibility of home in a world that we supremely value. He sees love as motivated by a promise of "ontological rootedness," rather than, as two thousand years of tradition variously asserts, by beauty or goodness, by a search for wholeness, by virtue, by sexual or reproductive desire, by compassion or altruism or empathy, or, in one of today's dominant views, by no qualities at all of the loved one. After arguing that such founding Western myths as the Odyssey and Abraham's call by God to Canaan in the Bible powerfully exemplify his new conception of love, May goes on to re-examine the relation of love to beauty, sex, and goodness in the light of this conception, offering among other things a novel theory of beauty-and suggesting, against Plato, that we can love others for their ugliness (while also seeing them as beautiful). Finally, he proposes that, in the Western world, romantic love is gradually giving way to parental love as the most valued form of love: namely, the love without which one's life is not deemed complete or truly flourishing. May explains why childhood has become sacred and excellence in parenting a paramount ideal-as well as a litmus test of society's moral health. In doing so, he argues that the child is the first genuinely "modern" supreme object of love: the first to fully reflect what Nietzsche called "the death of God."

The tragedy of American science is that its direction is determined by private profit rather than by the desire to improve the human condition. As a result, Conner argues, Big Science has been irredeemably corrupted by Big Money. This corruption threatens the air we breathe, the water we drink, the food we eat, and the medicines we take. The Tragedy of American Science explores how the U.S. economy's addiction to military spending distorts and deforms science by making it overwhelmingly subservient to military interests. The primary motive driving American science and technology has become the search for new and more efficient ways to kill people. This transforms science from the classic ideal of a creative force for the advancement of humankind into its destructive and antihuman opposite. That those trillions of dollars in resources and scientific talent are not devoted to solving the problems of poverty, disease, and environmental destruction is one of the greatest tragedies of our times. While the underlying problems may appear intractable, Conner compellingly argues that replacing the current science-for-profit system with a science-for-human-needs system is not an impossible, utopian dream. But to get there, we'll need to grapple with this important history.

Conversations around diversity, equity, and inclusion in science communication are in danger of generating much concern without effecting change and systematic transformations. This radical volume addresses these circular discourses and reveals the gaps in the field. Putting the spotlight on the marginalised voices of so-called 'racialised minorities', and those from Global South regions, it interrogates the global footprint of the science communication enterprise. Moving beyond tokenistic and extractive approaches, this book creates a space for academics and practitioners to challenge issues around race and sociocultural inclusion, providing mutual learning, paradigm-shifting perspectives, and innovative ways forward for the science communication advancement agenda. Chapter 12 is available Open Access under CC-BY-NC-ND licence.

This is an examination, from a feminist historian's standpoint, of the background to the present system of regulating prostitution in Britain - which is generally admitted to be not only unjust and discriminatory, but ineffective even in achieving its stated aims. Concentrating on the 1950s, and especially on the Wolfenden Report and the 1959 Street Offences Act, it is a thorough exposure of the sexual double standard and general misogynist assumptions underlying legislation relating to prostitution. In addition to the detailed analysis of the 1950s legislation and the background to it, there is an exposition of the subsequent workings of the Act, and of attempts to amend or repeal it.

What can we learn from the tragedy of these exploited young people?In Thailand, a thriving sex industry makes its money exploiting the young. Some children are coerced into prostitution and some have been sold into sexual slavery by their own families, but just as tragically there is no shortage of young girls (and boys) willing to work as prostitutes. Child Prostitution in Thailand: Listening to Rahab searches for the reasons why. This uniquely insightful book looks into the lives--and even more importantly, listens to the words--of ten Thai prostitutes. Child Prostitution in Thailand is about what we can learn from them--who they are, what they go through, and why.In their own words, the young prostitutes you'll meet in this book Thailand discuss what brought them into this life. Some have come from a tragic home situation, but not all are impoverished, orphaned, or abused. Nevertheless, they have entered into a dangerous and degrading lifestyle that often leads to violence, sickness, and early death. Of these ten prostitutes, one has already passed away and four more are dying with AIDS.This remarkable volume will help you to understand: how Thailand's child prostitution industry developed the impact upon girls and young women of Thailand's evolution from an agriculturally based economy to an industrial one changing forms of child prostitution who the customers are the role of tourism and its impact on child prostitution in Thailand how poverty, poor education, a sexually focused mass media, lack of religious emphasis, disability, and the lack of a clear policy on child prostitution help the sex industry to thrive This book also explores the details of child prostitution in Thailand--for instance, in open-air "restaurants" and "pubs" in Chiang Mai, your young waitress may double as a sex worker--and her provocative "uniform" represents a dress code enforced by the establishment's owner. A "cafe" is another kind of sex service disguised as (and functioning as) a bar/restaurant. Here, young girls working ten- and eleven-hour shifts in short skirts must wear price tags pinned to their shirts and may have to service five to ten clients per night.The head of the U.S. State Department's office for international women's issues estimates that traffickers bring 50,000 women and children into the United States illegally each year. The lessons Listening to Rahab teaches can help us to better understand the situation here at home as well as overseas. A helpful appendix assessing incidents of child prostitution around the globe bring the information even more clearly into focus.

Empathy is a term used increasingly both in moral theory and animal ethics, with the suggestion that empathy enhances our moral ability and agency. Yet, its precise meaning is often left unexplored, together with the various obstacles and challenges met by an empathy-based ethic, such as those concerning the ways in which empathy is prone to bias and may also facilitate manipulation of others. These oversights render the contemporary discussion on empathy and animal ethics vulnerable to both conceptual confusion and moral simplicity. The book aims to tackle these problems by clarifying the different and even contradictory ways in which "empathy" can be defined, and by exploring the at times surprising implications the various definitions have from the viewpoint of moral agency. Its main question is: What types of empathy hinder moral ability, and what types enable us to become more morally capable in our dealings with the nonhuman world? During the contemporary era, when valuable forms of empathy are in decline, and the more hazardous, self-regarding and biased varieties of utilising empathy in the increase, this question is perhaps more important than ever.

When the photographs depicting torture at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison were released in 2004, U.S. politicians attributed the incident to a few bad apples in the American military, exonerated high-ranking members of the George W. Bush administration, promoted Guantanamo as a model prison, and dismissed the illegality of the CIA's use of "enhanced interrogation." By the end of the Bush administration, members of both major congressional parties had come to denounce enhanced interrogation as torture and argue for the closing of Guantanamo. What initiated this shift? In Talking About Torture, Jared Del Rosso reviews transcripts from congressional hearings and scholarship on denial, torture, and state violence to document this wholesale change in rhetoric and attitude toward the use of torture by the CIA and the U.S. military during the War on Terror. He plots the evolution of the "torture issue" in U.S. politics and its manipulation by politicians to serve various ends. Most important, Talking About Torture integrates into the debate about torture the testimony of those who suffered under American interrogation practices and demonstrates how the conversation continues to influence current counterterrorism policies, such as the reliance on drones.

Animals, like humans, suffer and die from natural causes. This is particularly true of animals living in the wild, given their high exposure to, and low capacity to cope with, harmful natural processes. Most wild animals likely have short lives, full of suffering, usually ending in terrible deaths. This book argues that on the assumption that we have reasons to assist others in need, we should intervene in nature to prevent or reduce the harms wild animals suffer, provided that it is feasible and that the expected result is positive overall. It is of the utmost importance that academics from different disciplines as well as animal advocates begin to confront this issue. The more people are concerned with wild animal suffering, the more probable it is that safe and effective solutions to the plight of wild animals will be implemented in the future.

Beyond lust, create companionship with your sex workers Many more men are willing to buy sex than to admit the fact. Joseph Itiel is not only willing to admit it--he has the courage and style to create "virtual" relationships with hustlers. These ongoing professional relationships are a step beyond cold, anonymous sex for sale. Though the economic basis remains the same--an open exchange of cash for sex--the association is also honest, affectionate, and sexually fulfilling. He explains how you can do the same in Sex Workers as Virtual Boyfriends, a companion volume to his best-selling A Consumer's Guide to Male Hustlers (Haworth 1998).From his own experience, stretching over four decades and many nations, the author suggests ways to transform the relationship between a client and his escort from a crass commercial transaction to a true camaraderie. Sex Workers as Virtual Boyfriends also offers an intimate glimpse into the gay lifestyle in San Francisco and around the world before the AIDS epidemic and in these days of safer sex. Sex Workers as Virtual Boyfriends presents practical tips and real-life vignettes, including: an experiment to help you decide if you could be a sex worker (See if you measure up ) an appendix containing a comprehensive list of sex workers advertising on the World Wide Web seven guidelines for friendly relations with your escort a guide to the etiquette of negotiable affectionSex Workers as Virtual Boyfriends is shocking, sexy, literate, and fun. It also can help you find the affection you want--at a price you can afford.

Pornography is a $10 billion industry. Obscene Profits takes a "how-to" analytical approach to the business and profiles the entrepreneurs of the sex trade. This approach sparks many questions about freedom of speech, capitalism, morality, and the role of goverment regulation in business.

The Abortion Act 1967 may be the most contested law in UK history, sitting on a fault line between the shifting tectonic plates of a rapidly transforming society. While it has survived repeated calls for its reform, with its text barely altered for over five decades, women's experiences of accessing abortion services under it have evolved considerably. Drawing on extensive archival research and interviews, this book explores how the Abortion Act was given meaning by a diverse cast of actors including women seeking access to services, doctors and service providers, campaigners, judges, lawyers, and policy makers. By adopting an innovative biographical approach to the law, the book shows that the Abortion Act is a 'living law'. Using this historically grounded socio-legal approach, this enlightening book demonstrates how the Abortion Act both shaped and was shaped by a constantly changing society.

Human genetic enhancement, examined from the standpoint of the new field of political bioethics, displaces the age-old question of truth: What is human nature? This book displaces that question with another: What kind of human nature should humans want to create for themselves? To answer that question, this book answers two others: What constraints should limit the applications of rapidly developing biotechnologies? What could possibly form the basis for corresponding public policy in a democratic society? Benjamin Gregg focuses on the distinctly political dimensions of human nature, where politics refers to competition among competing values on which to base public policy, legislation, and political culture. This book offers citizens of democratic communities a broad perspective on how they together might best approach urgent questions of how to deal with the socially and morally challenging potential for human genetic engineering.

Human genetic enhancement, examined from the standpoint of the new field of political bioethics, displaces the age-old question of truth: What is human nature? This book displaces that question with another: What kind of human nature should humans want to create for themselves? To answer that question, this book answers two others: What constraints should limit the applications of rapidly developing biotechnologies? What could possibly form the basis for corresponding public policy in a democratic society? Benjamin Gregg focuses on the distinctly political dimensions of human nature, where politics refers to competition among competing values on which to base public policy, legislation, and political culture. This book offers citizens of democratic communities a broad perspective on how they together might best approach urgent questions of how to deal with the socially and morally challenging potential for human genetic engineering.

Practicing chemists face a number of ethical considerations, from issues of attribution of authorship through the potential environmental impact of a new process to the decision to work on chemicals that could be weaponised. By keeping ethical considerations in mind when working, chemists can build their own credibility, contribute to public trust in the chemical sciences and do science that benefits the world. Divided into three parts, methodological aspects, research ethics, and social and environmental implications, Good Chemistry introduces tools and concepts to help chemists recognise the ethical and social dimensions of their own work and act appropriately. Written to support chemistry students in their studies this book includes practice questions and examples of relevant situations to help students engage with the subject and prepare for their professional life in academia, industry, or public service.

An up-close look at how porn permeates our culture Pictures of half-naked girls and women can seem to litter almost every screen, billboard, and advertisement in America. Pole-dancing studios keep women fit. Men airdrop their dick pics to female passengers on planes and trains. To top it off, the last American President has bragged about grabbing women "by the pussy." This pornification of our society is what Bernadette Barton calls "raunch culture." Barton explores what raunch culture is, why it matters, and how it is ruining America. She exposes how internet porn drives trends in programming, advertising, and social media, and makes its way onto our phones, into our fashion choices, and into our sex lives. From twerking and breast implants, to fake nails and push-up bras, she explores just how much we encounter raunch culture on a daily basis-porn is the new normal. Drawing on interviews, television shows, movies, and social media, Barton argues that raunch culture matters not because it is sexy, but because it is sexist. She shows how young women are encouraged to be sexy like porn stars, and to be grateful for getting cat-called or receiving unsolicited dick pics. As politicians vote to restrict women's access to birth control and abortion, The Pornification of America exposes the double standard we attach to women's sexuality.

Social work is often presented as a benevolent and politically neutral profession, avoiding discussion about its sometimes troubling political histories. This book rethinks social work's legacy and history of both political resistance and complicity with oppressive and punitive practices. Using a comparative approach with international case studies, the book uncovers the role of social workers in politically tense episodes of recent history including the anti-racist struggle in the US and the impact of colonialism in Australia, New Zealand and Canada. As the de-colonisation of curricula and Black Lives Matter movement gain momentum, the fascinating book skilfully navigates social work's collective political past while considering its future.

The book opens up a space of frank discussion about the often unsettling, messy realities of ethical decision-making in the thick of social research. All the contributors write in the first person about personal experiences of research. They expose tensions within professional codes of ethics, as well as a range of dilemmas that arose when personal ethical convictions jostled with disciplinary and institutional ethical imperatives. The book is unique in spanning a range of research scenarios, qualitative and quantitative, across different disciplines, fields of study and institutional settings. The book will be of interest to all social researchers - in universities, NGOs and other applied milieu working in fields of research structured by hierarchies of difference and conditions of inequality.

A former U.S. Assistant Secretary of State and currently a Distinguished Fellow at the Heritage Foundation, Kim R. Holmes surveys the state of liberalism in America today and finds that it is becoming its opposite-illiberalism-abandoning the precepts of open-mindedness and respect for individual rights, liberties, and the rule of law upon which the country was founded, and becoming instead an intolerant, rigidly dogmatic ideology that abhors dissent and stifles free speech. Tracing the new illiberalism historically to the radical Enlightenment, a movement that rejected the classic liberal ideas of the moderate Enlightenment that were prominent in the American Founding, Holmes argues that today's liberalism has forsaken its American roots, incorporating instead the authoritarian, anti-clerical, and anti-capitalist prejudices of the radical and largely European Left. The result is a closing of the American liberal mind. Where once freedom of speech and expression were sacrosanct, today liberalism employs speech codes, trigger warnings, boycotts, and shaming rituals to stifle freedom of thought, expression, and action. It is no longer appropriate to call it liberalism at all, but illiberalism-a set of ideas in politics, government, and popular culture that increasingly reflects authoritarian and even anti-democratic values, and which is devising new strategies of exclusiveness to eliminate certain ideas and people from the political process. Although illiberalism has always been a temptation for American liberals, lurking in the radical fringes of the Left, it is today the dominant ideology of progressive liberal circles. This makes it a new danger not only to the once venerable tradition of liberalism, but to the American nation itself, which needs a viable liberal tradition that pursues social and economic equality while respecting individual liberties.

The decision to build a new army camp in the small market town of Colchester in 1856 was well received and helped to stimulate the local economy after a prolonged period of economic stagnation. Before long the Colchester garrison was one of the largest in the country and the town experienced an economic upturn as well as benefiting from the many social events organised by officers. But there was a downside: some of the soldiers' behaviour was highly disruptive and, since very few private soldiers were allowed to marry, prostitution flourished. As a result the number of cases of venereal disease soared. Having compiled a database of nearly 350 of Colchester's nineteenth-century prostitutes, the authors examine how they lived and operated and who their customers were. What were the routes into and out of prostitution and what was life like as a prostitute? Was it even seen by some as an acceptable way for girls and young women to boost inadequate earnings from more respectable work? How did prostitution intersect with the social life of the town, especially as this was played out in local beerhouses? This is also an investigation of how authority in its many guises - from policeman and solicitor to magistrate and lady reformer - dealt with prostitution and the many problems associated with it, bringing a great many vested interests into conflict with each other. Such large numbers of women could not be tidied away into a discreet red-light district but lived and worked all over the town. They gave the police considerable trouble, but it was routinely declared that nothing could be done about them. Prostitution itself was not illegal whilst efforts to tackle the women's criminal activity, such as soliciting, theft or assault, were largely ineffective. Under pressure from the army, Parliament passed the Contagious Diseases Acts, allowing prostitutes affected with venereal symptoms in garrison towns to be confined for treatment, but there was widespread opposition to these controversial laws. Bringing to bear considerations of class and gender, urban development, health and welfare, religion and moral reform, this is a wide-ranging, detailed and original study. As well as providing a vivid portrait of nineteenth-century Colchester, it will appeal to all those interested in the history of women's work, policing and society more widely.

Political hackers, like the infamous Anonymous collective, have demonstrated their willingness to use political violence to further their agendas. However, many of their causes - targeting terrorist groups, fighting for LGBTQ+ rights, and protecting people's freedom of expression, autonomy and privacy - are intuitively good things to fight for. This book will create a new framework that argues that when the state fails to protect people, hackers can intervene and evaluates the hacking based on the political or social circumstances. It highlights the space for hackers to operate as legitimate actors; guides hacker activity by detailing what actions are justified toward what end; outlines mechanisms to aid hackers in reaching ethically justified decisions; and directs the political community on how to react to these political hackers. Applying this framework to the most pivotal hacking operations within the last two decades, including the Arab Spring, police brutality in the USA and the Nigerian and Ugandan governments' announcements of homophobic legislation, it offers a unique contribution to conceptualising hacking as a contemporary political activity

In this brave and devastatingly beautiful anthology, the illustrious poet and editor Aracelis Girmay gathers complex and intimate pieces that illuminate the nuances of personal and collective histories, analyses, practices, and choices surrounding pregnancy. Featuring the brilliant voices of writers such as Cheryl Boyce-Taylor, Patricia Smith, Elizabeth Alexander, and more, this book is a lighthouse-a tool and companion-for those navigating pregnancy, abortion, miscarriage, birth, loss, grief, and love. In So We Can Know: Writers of Color on Pregnancy, pieces range from essays to poems to interviews, with a broad entanglement of various themes, from many different perspectives including Black, Indigenous, Asian, Latinx, and more. At a time when people are becoming more and more limited in their choices surrounding pregnancy and abortion, this record is increasingly urgent and indispensable.