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425 books match the query 'Human rights' and 18 start with d

cover of Dangerous Spirit of Liberty: The Politics of Slaves and Rebels in Early America and the West Indies, 1688-1748

Dangerous Spirit of Liberty

The Politics of Slaves and Rebels in Early America and the West Indies, 1688-1748

Justin James Pope

University of Missouri Press, 2024

Justin Pope’s ground-breaking work tells the story of an era of slave unrest that swept through the Atlantic World in the first half of the eighteenth century. Provinces along the eastern coast of North America and around the Caribbean Sea experienced more insurrections and conspiracy trials in the 1730s and 1740s than in any period before the Age of Revolution. The governor of Jamaica warned his king that slaves were spreading a “dangerous Spirit of Liberty” throughout the West Indies, concerns echoed by European colonists on the northern mainland. African-born slaves rose in rebellion and captured the Danish island of Saint John, and Maroons waged a successful war in Jamaica, events that became news in the wider Atlantic World. By the early 1740s, word of emancipation and widespread rebellion had taken hold in slave communities from the coast of South America to the harbors of New York City. Colonial authorities responded to rumors of slave plotting with brutal conspiracy trials, exhorting false confessions and executing hundreds of men and women in travesties of justice in need of retelling. Scholars have long noted this period of intensified slave unrest, not unlike the era of the Haitian Revolution, but no one has conducted a full-length study of this early tumult across empires. This book explains the causes behind this rash of insurrections, both real and imagined, and explores the consequences for the peoples of the eighteenth-century Atlantic World.

Dangerous Spirit of Liberty's distinguishing feature is its focus on the role of communication in the development of a rebellious early eighteenth-century Atlantic. Most historians of slavery have presupposed that slave unrest was confined to small locales in the first half of the eighteenth century. In fact, slaves found ways to share news across provinces to great effect. Benefiting from research in the archives of Great Britain, Spain, Barbados, Bermuda, Jamaica, Antigua, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and the mainland United States, the book reveals new evidence of slave communication networks and shows how people of African ancestry shared rumors of emancipation and rebellion in this period. Slaves laboring in colonial commerce and working aboard ships helped foster an increasingly restive Black community. Banished slaves, convicted conspirators accused of plotting insurrection, carried their experiences with them in exile to neighboring colonies. By reconstructing the path of news, the book reveals rumors and reports that particularly resonated among slaves in the early eighteenth century.
 
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cover of Decentring Race: The Politics of Welcoming Ukrainians in Romania

Decentring Race

The Politics of Welcoming Ukrainians in Romania

Raluca Bejan

Central European University Press, 2026

When Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022 and people began to flee the country, the hospitality of neighbouring countries towards Ukrainians was set in stark contrast to their reluctance to accommodate refugees from Africa and the Middle East. Critics suggested that Europe was treating refugees from Ukraine better than those from the Global South, and attributed this difference to race. Using Romania as a case study, and drawing on fifty-one interviews with civil society stakeholders, community activists, and Romanian state officials, and twenty-five interviews with international students who were in Ukraine at the time of the invasion, Decentring Race complicates the story that singles out race as the primary factor in the categorization of refugees as either deserving or undeserving. Alongside nationality, ethnicity, religion, class, gender, and local racial politics, it brings to the fore geopolitical realities and the bipartite EU-Ukraine legislative framework as factors that shaped the granting of transnational mobility rights.
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cover of Dedicated to the People of Darfur: Writings on Fear, Risk, and Hope

Dedicated to the People of Darfur

Writings on Fear, Risk, and Hope

Edited and with an Introduction by Luke Reynolds and Jennifer Reynolds

Rutgers University Press, 2009

Life's changes. They happen every day. Some large, some small. A few are very personal. Others impact the world. Dedicated to the People of Darfur: Writings on Fear, Risk, and Hope includes original and inspiring essays that celebrate the glories gained from taking risks, breaking down barriers, and overcoming any obstacles.

Nobel and Pulitzer Prize winners, a gallery of O.Henry award recipients, and many best-selling authors come together to share personal and compelling challenges and experiences. From contemplations on past drug use to reflections on gun control, social justice, passion and its sacrifices, and adventures such as skydiving, mountain climbing, and golfing, the topics vary greatly. This kaleidoscopic anthology is a commentary on the lives of prominent literary artists and ordinary citizens who have made simple, yet powerful choices that provoked change in one's self and for humanityùmuch the same way that Luke and Jennifer Reynolds do by building this invaluable collection for readers and the world of human rights.

Not too long ago, as struggling graduate students, Luke and Jennifer Reynolds conceived this uniquely themed volume as a way to raise funds to support ending the genocide in Darfur. Some people carry signs, others make speeches, many take action. What is most special about this book is that it extends beyond words and ideas, into a tangible effort to effect change. To this end, all royalties from the sales of Dedicated to the People of Darfur:Writings on Fear, Risk, and Hope will benefit The Save Darfur Coalition, an organization that seeks to end the genocide in Darfur, Sudan.

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cover of Defeat Is the Only Bad News: Rwanda under Musinga, 1896–1931

Defeat Is the Only Bad News

Rwanda under Musinga, 1896–1931

Alison Des Forges

University of Wisconsin Press, 2011

A Rwandan proverb says “Defeat is the only bad news.” For Rwandans living under colonial rule, winning called not only for armed confrontation, but also for a battle of wits—and not only with foreigners, but also with each other. In Defeat Is the Only Bad News Alison Des Forges recounts the ambitions, strategies, and intrigues of an African royal court under Yuhi Musinga, the Rwandan ruler from 1896 to 1931. These were turbulent years for Rwanda, when first Germany and then Belgium pursued an aggressive plan of colonization there. At the time of the Europeans’ arrival, Rwanda was also engaged in a succession dispute after the death of one of its most famous kings. Against this backdrop, the Rwandan court became the stage for a drama of Shakespearean proportions, filled with deceit, shrewd calculation, ruthless betrayal, and sometimes murder.

            Historians who study European expansion typically focus on interactions between colonizers and colonized; they rarely attend to relations among the different factions inhabiting occupied lands. Des Forges, drawing on oral histories and extensive archival research, reveals how divisions among different groups in Rwanda shaped their responses to colonial governments, missionaries, and traders. Rwandans, she shows, used European resources to extend their power, even as they sought to preserve the autonomy of the royal court. Europeans, for their part, seized on internal divisions to advance their own goals. Des Forges’s vividly narrated history, meticulously edited and introduced by David Newbury, provides a deep context for understanding the Rwandan civil war a century later.
 
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cover of Delegating Responsibility: International Cooperation on Migration in the European Union

Delegating Responsibility

International Cooperation on Migration in the European Union

Nicholas R. Micinski

University of Michigan Press, 2022

Delegating Responsibility explores the politics of migration in the European Union and explains how the EU responded to the 2015–17 refugee crisis. Based on 86 interviews and fieldwork in Greece and Italy, Nicholas R. Micinski proposes a new theory of international cooperation on international migration. States approach migration policies in many ways—such as coordination, collaboration, subcontracting, and unilateralism—but which policy they choose is based on capacity and on credible partners on the ground. Micinski traces the fifty-year evolution of EU migration management, like border security and asylum policies, and shows how EU officials used “crises” as political leverage to further Europeanize migration governance. In two in-depth case studies, he explains how Italy and Greece responded to the most recent refugee crisis. He concludes with a discussion of policy recommendations regarding contemporary as well as long-term aspirations for migration management in the EU.

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cover of Demanding Justice and Security: Indigenous Women and Legal Pluralities in Latin America

Demanding Justice and Security

Indigenous Women and Legal Pluralities in Latin America

Sieder, Rachel

Rutgers University Press, 2017

Across Latin America, indigenous women are organizing to challenge racial, gender, and class discrimination through the courts. Collectively, by engaging with various forms of law, they are forging new definitions of what justice and security mean within their own contexts and struggles. They have challenged racism and the exclusion of indigenous people in national reforms, but also have challenged ‘bad customs’ and gender ideologies that exclude women within their own communities.
 
Featuring chapters on Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Guatemala, and Mexico, the contributors to Demanding Justice and Security include both leading researchers and community activists. From Kichwa women in Ecuador lobbying for the inclusion of specific clauses in the national constitution that guarantee their rights to equality and protection within indigenous community law, to Me’phaa women from Guerrero, Mexico, battling to secure justice within the Inter-American Court of Human Rights for violations committed in the context of militarizing their home state, this book is a must-have for anyone who wants to understand the struggle of indigenous women in Latin America.
 
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cover of Democracy in Mexico: Attitudes and Perceptions of Citizens at National and Local Level

Democracy in Mexico

Attitudes and Perceptions of Citizens at National and Local Level

Edited by Salvador Marti i Puig, Reynaldo Yunuen Ortega Ortiz, M. Fernanda Somuano Ventura, and Claire Wright

University of London Press, 2014

Democracy in Mexico. Attitudes and perceptions of citizens at national and local level, offers an important contribution to one of the more complex and multifaceted political processes of recent decades in Latin America: Mexico's democratisation at the national and subnational levels. The chapters - on topics including the quality of democracy, political participation and insecurity, amongst others - have been researched and written by a group of academics from the University of Salamanca and El Colegio de México, with the support of the Spanish Agency for International Cooperation and Development (AECID) and the Mexican Council of Science and Technology (CONACYT). Importantly, the volume is based on two surveys carried out throughout Mexico in 2009 and in 2011. The result of this period of collaboration is one of the few existing studies on democratic processes in the Mexican states, which we hope will provoke an important debate within the academic community.
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cover of Destroy Them Gradually: Displacement as Atrocity

Destroy Them Gradually

Displacement as Atrocity

Andrew R. Basso

Rutgers University Press, 2024

Perpetrators of mass atrocities have used displacement to transport victims to killing sites or extermination camps to transfer victims to sites of forced labor and attrition, to ethnically homogenize regions by moving victims out of their homes and lands, and to destroy populations by depriving them of vital daily needs. Displacement has been treated as a corollary practice to crimes committed, not a central aspect of their perpetration. Destroying Them Gradually examines four cases that illuminate why perpetrators have destroyed populations using displacement policies: Germany’s genocide of the Herero (1904–1908); Ottoman genocides of Christian minorities (1914–1925); expulsions of Germans from East/Central Europe (1943–1952); and climate violence (twenty-first century). Because displacement has been typically framed as a secondary aspect of mass atrocities, existing scholarship overlooks how perpetrators use it as a means of executing destruction rather than a vehicle for moving people to a specific location to commit atrocities.
 
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cover of Dignity and Health

Dignity and Health

Nora Jacobson

Vanderbilt University Press, 2012

In these hard times of global financial peril and growing social inequality, injuries to dignity are pervasive. "Indignity has many faces," one man told Nora Jacobson as she conducted interviews for this book. Its expressions range from rudeness, indifference, and condescension to objectification, discrimination, and exploitation. Yet dignity can also be promoted. Another man described it as "common respect," suggesting dignity's ordinariness, and the ways we can create and share it through practices like courtesy, leveling, and contribution.


Dignity and Health examines the processes and structures of dignity violation and promotion, traces their consequences for individual and collective health, and uses the model developed to imagine how we might reform our systems of health and social care.


With its focus on the dignity experiences of those often excluded from the mainstream--people who are poor, or homeless, or dealing with mental health problems--as well as on vulnerabilities like age or sickness or unemployment that threaten to make us all feel "less than," Dignity and Health recognizes dignity as a moral matter embedded in the choices we make every day.
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cover of Dignity and Health

Dignity and Health

Nora Jacobson

Vanderbilt University Press, 2012

In these hard times of global financial peril and growing social inequality, injuries to dignity are pervasive. "Indignity has many faces," one man told Nora Jacobson as she conducted interviews for this book. Its expressions range from rudeness, indifference, and condescension to objectification, discrimination, and exploitation. Yet dignity can also be promoted. Another man described it as "common respect," suggesting dignity's ordinariness, and the ways we can create and share it through practices like courtesy, leveling, and contribution.


Dignity and Health examines the processes and structures of dignity violation and promotion, traces their consequences for individual and collective health, and uses the model developed to imagine how we might reform our systems of health and social care.


With its focus on the dignity experiences of those often excluded from the mainstream--people who are poor, or homeless, or dealing with mental health problems--as well as on vulnerabilities like age or sickness or unemployment that threaten to make us all feel "less than," Dignity and Health recognizes dignity as a moral matter embedded in the choices we make every day.
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cover of Disability, Civil Rights, and Public Policy: The Politics of Implementation

Disability, Civil Rights, and Public Policy

The Politics of Implementation

Stephen L. Percy

University of Alabama Press, 1989

An examination of US public policymaking and securing rights for people with disabilities.

Following on the heels of other Civil Rights movements, disability rights laws emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Often these laws were more symbolic than precise in terms of objectives and strategies to guide the implementation of antidiscrimination policies. Policy refinement, the process of translating legislative mandates into strategies and procedures to govern administrative action, is both dynamic and controversial.

The premise of Disability, Civil Rights, and Public Policy is that implementation policies in these areas evolved through protracted political struggles among a variety of persons and groups affected by disability rights laws. Efforts to influence policies extended far beyond the process of legislative enactment and resulted in struggles that were played out in the courts and in the executive branch. Included within this examination of federal disability rights laws are the role of symbolic politics, the strengths and weaknesses of contemporary models used for the study of policy implementation, and the politics of administrative policymaking.
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cover of Disabling Relations: Wounded Bodyminds and Transnational Praxis

Disabling Relations

Wounded Bodyminds and Transnational Praxis

Sona Kazemi

Temple University Press, 2026

How do we learn to defetishize disability in our everyday lives? In Disabling Relations, Sona Kazemi probes this and other questions that consider how processes and relations of patriarchy, imperialism, and religious fundamentalism, as well as class and ideology, rework the dialectics of disability in transnational contexts.
 
Kazemi focuses on the disabled dissidents who were incarcerated and tortured by the Islamic regime in the aftermath of the 1979 revolution in Iran, the disabled veterans and civilians wounded during and after  the Iran–Iraq War, the disabled survivors of state-sanctioned punitive limb amputation, and the disabled women survivors of acid attacks as a form of gender-based violence. Disabling Relations explains how disabled bodyminds are produced and sustained through the violence of patriarchal, capitalist-imperialist, nationalist, and theocratic social relations. Kazemi uses the theoretical concept of “wounding” as a historical process of becoming and remaining disabled mediated by unequal power relations and “disability consciousness” to show how these survivors come to terms with their disability.

Thinking about critical disability theory in a new way, Kazemi investigates how disability is produced transnationally and the impact that this new theorization can make globally.

In the series Dis/color
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cover of Discipline and the Other Body: Correction, Corporeality, Colonialism

Discipline and the Other Body

Correction, Corporeality, Colonialism

Steven Pierce and Anupama Rao, eds.

Duke University Press, 2006

Discipline and the Other Body reveals the intimate relationship between violence and difference underlying modern governmental power and the human rights discourses that critique it. The comparative essays brought together in this collection show how, in using physical violence to discipline and control colonial subjects, governments repeatedly found themselves enmeshed in a fundamental paradox: Colonialism was about the management of difference—the “civilized” ruling the “uncivilized”—but colonial violence seemed to many the antithesis of civility, threatening to undermine the very distinction that validated its use. Violation of the bodies of colonial subjects regularly generated scandals, and eventually led to humanitarian initiatives, ultimately changing conceptions of “the human” and helping to constitute modern forms of human rights discourse. Colonial violence and discipline also played a crucial role in hardening modern categories of difference—race, gender, ethnicity, sexuality, and religion.

The contributors, who include both historians and anthropologists, address instances of colonial violence from the early modern period to the twentieth century and from Asia to Africa to North America. They consider diverse topics, from the interactions of race, law, and violence in colonial Louisiana to British attempts to regulate sex and marriage in the Indian army in the early nineteenth century. They examine the political dilemmas raised by the extensive use of torture in colonial India and the ways that British colonizers flogged Nigerians based on beliefs that different ethnic and religious affiliations corresponded to different degrees of social evolution and levels of susceptibility to physical pain. An essay on how contemporary Sufi healers deploy bodily violence to maintain sexual and religious hierarchies in postcolonial northern Nigeria makes it clear that the state is not the only enforcer of disciplinary regimes based on ideas of difference.

Contributors. Laura Bear, Yvette Christiansë, Shannon Lee Dawdy, Dorothy Ko, Isaac Land, Susan O’Brien, Douglas M. Peers, Steven Pierce, Anupama Rao, Kerry Ward

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cover of Disease and Diplomacy: Weaponizing Medical Aid to Syrian Refugees in Jordan

Disease and Diplomacy

Weaponizing Medical Aid to Syrian Refugees in Jordan

Sigrid Lupieri

University of Michigan Press, 2026

When millions of Syrians fled civil war after 2011, international donors and humanitarian organizations mobilized to provide assistance to neighboring countries. Focusing on Jordan—one of the world’s largest refugee hosting states—Disease and Diplomacy investigates how medical aid to refugees operates as an instrument of diplomacy and control within the global refugee system. It argues that health, far from being an apolitical humanitarian good, is a bargaining tool that states commodify to extract resources and concessions.

Drawing on years of field research, interviews, and policy analysis, the book shows how the Jordanian government, international donors, and humanitarian agencies turned healthcare for refugees into a tool for negotiating power, resources, and responsibility. In these cases, refugees, caught within these negotiations, often found their access to care determined not by medical need, but by political calculation. Developing the concept of the weaponization of medical aid, the book extends theories of migration diplomacy and refugee rentierism to show how global power dynamics shape who receives healthcare. The analysis identifies a self-reinforcing “crisis loop” that privileges short-term, highly visible responses while neglecting chronic and long-term needs. Disease and Diplomacy advances an interdisciplinary framework for understanding how humanitarian practices reinforce global inequalities and argues for more equitable approaches to refugee health and responsibility-sharing in the international system.

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cover of Disputed Pasts: Forgetting and Remembering the Dictatorship in Brazil

Disputed Pasts

Forgetting and Remembering the Dictatorship in Brazil

Cristina Buarque de Hollanda and José Szwako

University of Texas Press, 2026

How the memory of military dictatorship shapes Brazil's political divides and the far-right's rise.

Brazil’s military dictatorship ended in 1985, but its history still looms large over the country. Since the restoration of democracy, national politics have been shaped by heated contestation over the dictatorship’s legacy. Cristina Buarque de Hollanda and José Szwako examine how the state, the military, and civil society have variously mourned, celebrated, and suppressed memories of Brazil’s violent past—and to what ends.

As the dictatorship faltered under pressure from the opposition in the streets and in Congress, popular opinion favored democracy, which often meant forgetting. Today, the Brazilian left contends that the past has been silenced, paving the way for Jair Bolsonaro and the far right. Yet the past has been intensely contested: media outlets, social movements, and official commissions have long documented the dictatorship and spurred reparations. Disputed Pasts argues that the conservative ascendency is a reaction to these efforts of remembrance. The right seeks to rehabilitate the violent past by discrediting victims and elevating the dictatorship’s anti-communist ideology. Far from forgetting the past, Bolsonaro and Bolsonarismo actively remember and celebrate it.

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cover of Dissensual Subjects: Memory, Human Rights, and Postdictatorship in Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay

Dissensual Subjects

Memory, Human Rights, and Postdictatorship in Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay

Andrew C. Rajca

Northwestern University Press, 2018

In Dissensual Subjects, Andrew C. Rajca combines cultural studies and critical theory to explore how the aftereffects of dictatorship have been used to formulate dominant notions of human rights in the present. In so doing, he critiques the exclusionary nature of these processes and highlights who and what count (and do not count) as subjects of human rights as a result.

Through an engaging exploration of the concept of “never again” (nunca más/nunca mais) and close analysis of photography exhibits, audiovisual installations, and other art forms in spaces of cultural memory, the book explores how aesthetic interventions can suggest alternative ways of framing human rights subjectivity beyond the rhetoric of liberal humanitarianism. The book visits sites of memory, two of which functioned as detention and torture centers during dictatorships, to highlight the tensions between the testimonial tenor of permanent exhibits and the aesthetic interventions of temporary installations there. Rajca thus introduces perspectives that both undo common understandings of authoritarian violence and its effects as well as reconfigure who or what are made visible as subjects of memory and human rights in postdictatorship countries.

Dissensual Subjects offers much to those concerned with numerous interlocking fields: memory, human rights, political subjectivity, aesthetics, cultural studies, visual culture, Southern Cone studies, postdictatorship studies, and sites of memory.
 
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cover of Dissident Genders and Sexualities in the Andes: Truth, Justice, and Reparations

Dissident Genders and Sexualities in the Andes

Truth, Justice, and Reparations

Pascha Bueno-Hansen

Rutgers University Press, 2027

Dissident Genders and Sexualities in the Andes: Truth, Justice, and Reparations reveals how people of non-normative genders and sexualities fight for truth, justice, and reparations in the aftermath of armed conflict and authoritarian regimes in Peru, Ecuador and Colombia. A focus on body politics flips the transitional justice model that focuses on nation-states to investigate massive human rights violations. How and why are harms against people of non-normative genders and sexualities included or excluded in Peruvian, Ecuadorian and Colombian transitional justice efforts? What strategies do activists use in the ongoing struggle for the recognition of their humanity through truth, justice and reparations? To answer these questions, Dissident Genders and Sexualities in the Andes focuses on activists and their embodied knowledge.

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cover of Domestic Violence at the Margins: Readings on Race, Class, Gender, and Culture

Domestic Violence at the Margins

Readings on Race, Class, Gender, and Culture

Sokoloff, Natalie J.

Rutgers University Press, 2005

"This is a thoughtful and scholarly addition to the unfortunately scarce literature on domestic violence and oppression in all its forms."—Jacquelyn C. Campbell, Anna D. Wolf Chair, Johns Hopkins University School of Nursing

"An exciting and powerful collection that eloquently critiques some of the current thinking in domestic violence and raises key concerns for advocates and scholars working in the area."—Sujata Warrier, president, board of directors, Manavi: An organization for South Asian women

"Sokoloff has assembled an impressive array of authors who challenge us to ‘think outside of our contemporary domestic violence box.’"—Angela M. Moore Parmley, chief, violence and victimization research division, National Institute of Justice

This groundbreaking anthology reorients the field of domestic violence research by bringing long-overdue attention to the structural forms of oppression in communities marginalized by race, ethnicity, religion, sexuality, or social class.

Reprints of the most influential recent work in the field as well as more than a dozen newly commissioned essays explore theoretical issues, current research, service provision, and activism among Latinos, African Americans, Asian Americans, Jewish Americans, and lesbians. The volume rejects simplistic analyses of the role of culture in domestic violence by elucidating the support systems available to battered women within different cultures, while at the same time addressing the distinct problems generated by that culture. Together, the essays pose a compelling challenge to stereotypical images of battered women that are racist, homophobic, and xenophobic.

The most up-to-date and comprehensive picture of domestic violence available, this anthology is an essential text for courses in sociology, criminology, social work, and women’s studies. Beyond the classroom, it provides critical information and resources for professionals working in domestic violence services, advocacy, social work, and law enforcement.

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