Skip to main content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Official websites use .gov
A .gov website belongs to an official government organization in the United States.

Secure .gov websites use HTTPS
A lock ( ) or https:// means you’ve safely connected to the .gov website. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites.

Skip to content

Evaluation of Safe Harbor Laws and Their Impact on the Commercial Sexual Exploitation of Children, United States, 2015-2018

Metadata Updated: November 28, 2023

The Institute of Medicine and National Research Council in 2013 called for a paradigm shift within the justice system, toward treating minors involved in commercial sex as victims instead of criminals. Their call ultimately led to a proliferation at the state level of safe harbor laws--laws designed to remove the punitive sanctions for young victims of commercial sexual exploitation. The goal of this study was to begin measuring the impact of safe harbor laws. The methodology blends quantitative and qualitative analyses in a three-phase design. Phase 1, a legal review, concentrates on the evolution of safe harbor laws in the United States. It presents an overview of Commercial Sexual Exploitation of Children (CSEC), details the philosophy and conceptualization of safe harbor laws, and presents findings regarding state-level efforts to adopt safe harbor laws. Phase 2 uses elements of the legal review to conduct a quantitative assessment of safe harbor laws employing a quasi-experimental, longitudinal design to compare counties that have and have not implemented safe harbor laws over an 11-year period (2005-15). Phase 3 involves an in-depth qualitative assessment of two states: one that implemented safe harbor laws and demonstrated positive outcomes, and one that implemented safe harbor laws without demonstrating positive outcomes.

Access & Use Information

Restricted: This dataset can only be accessed or used under certain conditions. License: us-pd

Downloads & Resources

Dates

Metadata Created Date February 13, 2023
Metadata Updated Date November 28, 2023

Metadata Source

Harvested from DOJ JSON

Additional Metadata

Resource Type Dataset
Metadata Created Date February 13, 2023
Metadata Updated Date November 28, 2023
Publisher Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention
Maintainer
Identifier 4287
Data First Published 2022-04-28T14:01:51
Language eng
Data Last Modified 2022-04-28T14:06:28
Rights These data are restricted due to the increased risk of violation of confidentiality of respondent and subject data.
Public Access Level restricted public
Bureau Code 011:21
Metadata Context https://project-open-data.cio.gov/v1.1/schema/catalog.jsonld
Metadata Catalog ID https://www.justice.gov/data.json
Schema Version https://project-open-data.cio.gov/v1.1/schema
Catalog Describedby https://project-open-data.cio.gov/v1.1/schema/catalog.json
Harvest Object Id 8ebe2af2-58d9-4a52-8b2f-a884555aae2b
Harvest Source Id 3290e90a-116f-42fc-86ac-e65521ef3b68
Harvest Source Title DOJ JSON
License http://www.usa.gov/publicdomain/label/1.0/
Program Code 011:000
Publisher Hierarchy Office of Justice Programs > Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention
Source Datajson Identifier True
Source Hash 8e8e56bd4d1b5cb5c4edeea3daf09989127c811b2c1e8c979b28209b81b24df7
Source Schema Version 1.1

Didn't find what you're looking for? Suggest a dataset here.