Gender Race and Inequality
The first article I chose, Prevalence and Risk of Violence and the Physical, Mental, and Sexual Health Problems Associated with Human Trafficking: Systematic Review (Sian Oram, Heidi Stokl, Joanna Busza, Louise M. Howard, Cathy Zimmerman) was about the health consequences in human sex trafficking in India. The article (Oram...2012) investigated what Indian women who had been trafficked faced in terms of violence, mental distress, and health related issues. They also investigated the prevalence of HIV in this country due to the sex trafficking industry that is going on in India. Reports showed that extreme forms of physical, psychological and sexual abuse were being used against these women in many labor settings such as construction, agriculture and domestic servitude.
The researchers in this article (Oram...2012) used a few research methods to conduct the study, including data extraction, quality appraisal and data analysis. Studies were chosen by the researchers by being under specific guidelines; males and females who were self-identified or defined by researchers for having been trafficked before, measured the participants experiences of physical, mental and sexual health, and presented the results of peer-reviewed research based on multiple studies such as experimental, case series analysis, cohort study, cross-sectional survey and case control study. The search strategy they used was electronic in which they screened the reference lists for certain words and phrases. Due to time constraints they did not do any hand searches of the articles and journals. They then performed data extraction by going through the journals and picking out which citations were relevant against their inclusion criteria. If they came across an article for the information was relevant though did not present any further information, the authors were contacted to receive further information. The researches independently extracted data randomly from twenty of the sources as a check, though no differences were found. The researches adopted a quality appraisal method from the Critical Appraisal Skills Programme and rated all of the studies based on their quality. The measurements focused on the measurement of exposure in each participant in the study and the outcomes that were found. They rated each study on a scale of 0-30. The lowest score given was 6/30 where the highest was 24/30. They performed all this research in the UK, as they did not do any studies themselves, but used other author's studies and compared and contrasted to gather information. The conclusion they came up with after everything was that the existing evidence suggested that trafficking is in fact heavily associated with violence and numerous serious health problems. I think the methods they used worked well and got them the information they needed in order to conduct the study. The methods they mainly used were comparative research and content analysis that did not require them to interact with and/or find participants in order to gather information. To make it better I feel they should have allowed for a larger time frame so they could have added their own findings into the study by interviewing previous women who had been trafficked.
The second article, Sex Trafficking and Initiation-Related Violence, Alcohol Use, and HIV Risk Among HIV-Infected Female Sex Workers in Mumbai, India (Jay G. Silverman, Anita Raj, Debbie M. Cheng, Michele R. Decker, Sharon Coleman, Carly Bridden, Manoj Pardeshi, Niranjan Saggurti, and Jeffrey H. Samet) is about how female sex workers in India are more susceptible to contracting HIV or other sexually transmitted diseases because of violence associated with sex trafficking. The amount of violence in the industry include high levels of sexual brutality with can cause vaginal injuries and blood less with makes the body less able to fight off an infection. They suspect people are using large amounts of alcohol in order to lure women into sex work, and the women continued to abuse alcohol to escape from what's happening to them use the continuous use.
The research method used in this study (Silverman...2011) was the survey method in which they did a 45-minute survey with each participant. The participants were recruited from the ASHA Center in Mumbai. The ASHA Center is a community-based organization that is managed and run by female sex workers who provide support to other women. 246 female sex workers agreed to participate in the study, but in order to be eligible you had to be over 18, have HIV, in the sex trade industry within the past year and had to have sex within the past thirty days. 211 participants were surveyed in total. The survey was given in Hindi and the interviewers assessed the participants' demographics, alcohol use, sex risk, behaviors and health status. Each participant was given 100 rupees for participating in the study. The questions that were given to the participants each had predetermined answers in which the participant had to choose which one best described their answer. They focused on the first month during sex work for each question because previous studies have shown higher violence rates, more alcohol use and less use of condoms during this time. They compared the results from their studies to some previous studies in order to see how accurate their results were and why or why not results would differ for possible situations. The results from the study showed that more than 2 in 5 HIV infected female sex workers were forced into the sex trade. This number is higher than previous studies but it's thought to be because of the high prevalence of HIV and female sex workers with HIV were more commonly forced into the trade not knowing all the dangers. The female sex workers used alcohol prominently in their work compared to sex workers that went into the sex industry willingly. I liked the method they used and I believe it suited this study well. I think survey worked well because they were able to use pre-written answers so when comparing the interviews, the answers would be better comparable then if they had to translate each participant's different way of wording things. I also think it'd be more comfortable for the participant to pick an answer instead of having to say how they felt on their own. The only thing I would change in this study would be to not only ask the participants about their first month in the sex industry, but then ask about the following months to see if anything had changed and why or why not. I think it would give a better insight into the sex trafficking world and what these girls go through and why many health problems arise from it.
If I chose to write an article on this topic I would choose the first article (Oram...2012) because I feel as though they went more into detail by pulling information from numerous previous studies on the topic. I feel that their results are more reliable. The numerous studies they chose help make the finding apply to a larger group of female sex workers instead of just one particular answer. They also could compare similar findings in the different studies that would make it seem that these findings were generally accurate. In the second article (Silverman...2011) it states that their results may be off a little because they only chose a certain group of female sex workers to interview. This group of females were also all from the same help center so their interaction with the other girls could have potentially skewed what they recall, and they also could of all had a similar experience that differs greatly from other female sex workers in India. The study may also be inflating the risk of HIV in sex trafficking by only choosing participants who had been diagnosed with the disease. I would in fact recommend both articles as useful as the second article (Silverman...2011) does still provide reliable information on how HIV affects the female sex workers and the first article (Oram...2012) provides useful information female sex workers in a more broad area of India.
