Identifying and Ameliorating Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Health Disparities in the Criminal Justice System

A Systematic Literature Review of Sexual Harassment Studies with Text Mining

Sexual harassment has been the topic of thousands of research articles in the 20th and 21st centuries. Several review papers have been developed to synthesize the literature about sexual harassment. While traditional literature review studies provide valuable insights, these studies have some limitations including analyzing a limited number of papers, being time-consuming and labor-intensive, focusing on a few topics, and lacking temporal trend analysis. To address these limitations, this paper employs both computational and qualitative approaches to identify major research topics, explore temporal trends of sexual harassment topics over the past few decades, and point to future possible directions in sexual harassment studies. We collected 5320 research papers published between 1977 and 2020, identified and analyzed sexual harassment topics, and explored the temporal trend of topics. Our findings indicate that sexual harassment in the workplace was the most popular research theme, and sexual harassment was investigated in a wide range of spaces ranging from school to military settings. Our analysis shows that 62.5% of the topics having a significant trend had an increasing (hot) temporal trend that is expected to be studied more in the coming years. This study offers a bird’s eye view to better understand sexual harassment literature with text mining, qualitative, and temporal trend analysis methods. This research could be beneficial to researchers, educators, publishers, and policymakers by providing a broad overview of the sexual harassment field.

Health Implications of Housing Assignments for Incarcerated Transgender Women

Transgender women (i.e., persons who were assigned male sex at birth but who live and identify as female) experience forms of discrimination that limit their access to stable housing and contribute to high rates of incarceration; once incarcerated, the approaches used to assign them housing within the jail or prison place them at risk for abuse, rape, and other outcomes. Yet, a paucity of studies explores the implications of carceral housing assignments for transgender women.Whether the approaches used to assign housing in jails and prisons violate the rights of incarcerated transgender persons has been argued before the US federal courts under Section 1983 of the US Constitution, which allows persons who were raped while incarcerated to claim a violation of their Eighth Amendment rights.Reforms and policy recommendations have been attempted; however, the results have been mixed and the public health implications have received limited attention.