The following is a collection of reports and studies which affect women in Arizona and beyond.

Included with each publication is an abstract to contextualize how these issues relate to Arizona specifically and offer solutions for how to affect change in our communities.

Entrapment and Enmeshment Schemes Used by Sex Traffickers

Author: Joan A. Reid

Publisher: SAGE Journals

Publishing Date: 2016

A study published in 2016 focused on the tactics used by sex traffickers to recruit and entrap young girls.

Data for the study were drawn from case files of trafficked girls who were receiving counseling from social service agencies in two metropolitan areas in Florida and from interviews with service providers with in-depth knowledge of the documented cases.

The study found that “tactics resembling the coercive and controlling techniques commonly observed in other types of exploitative relationships such as intimate partner violence were used by sex traffickers to recruit youth and to enmesh them in trafficking.” The tactics that traffickers used to entrap the young girls, included romancing and spending money on them, gaining their’ trust by taking care of them or helping them out of a difficult situation, using peers or boyfriends to recruit the, isolating them by controlling their access to cell phones and social media and by taking them to locations far from where they were recruited, and targeting those with intellectual disabilities. Similar tactics were used to ensure that the girls were enmeshed in sex trafficking: the traffickers would shame and blackmail them, engender a sense of obligation in them; make them complicit in crimes such as shoplifting and child pornography; use their children or a pregnancy to control them; restrict communication with others; and keep almost all of what they earned through prostitution.

The author concludes the paper by discussing how knowledge regarding the tactics of sex traffickers can be used to inform policies and practices designed to prevent sex trafficking and to enable victims to exit street prostitution.

Cost of Adverse Childhood Experiences in Arizona

Authors: Erica Quintana, Senior Research Analyst, Morrison Institute for Public Policy; Mackenzie C. Brooks, Herberger Young Scholar

Publisher: Arizona State University Morrison Institute for Public Policy

Publishing Date: March, 2021

Two decades of research has shown that early childhood adversity can increase the risk of experiencing negative health consequences. Adverse childhood experiences are traumatic events such as abuse, neglect, and household dysfunction. Children that experience multiple types of traumatic events are more likely to develop chronic health conditions like heart disease, cancer, chronic bronchitis/COPD, and diabetes later in life. ASU’s Morrison Institute for Public Policy sought to quantify this relationship for Arizona populations. The Morrison Institute study found that exposure to three or more ACEs for women was associated with $260 million in state Medicaid spending on COPD/bronchitis, stroke, diabetes, and heart disease. These findings indicate that early intervention and prevention programs to reduce or prevent ACEs could result in improvement to population health and cost savings for Arizona.

women in the workplace 2020

Publisher: McKinsey & Company, Lean In

Publishing Date: September 30, 2020

Women in the Workplace is the largest comprehensive study of the state of women in corporate America. In 2015, McKinsey & Company and LeanIn.Org launched the study to help companies advance diversity in the workplace and over time close to 600 companies and more than a quarter of a million people were surveyed on their workplace experiences. With insight from 400 Chief Human Resource Officers, the 2020 report highlights the challenges that women in corporate America face as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic, including the unique impact on women of different races and ethnicities, working mothers, women in senior leadership, and women with disabilities. The report also provides insight into what companies and employees see as the benefits and risks of remote work and best practices for eliminating bias in hiring and promotions—including what top-performing companies are doing.