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The Council on Social Work Education tasks social work programs to ensure students illustrate competency with regard to advocating for and advancing human rights. Given the three generations of human rights experience differing levels of guarantee and protection, multiple tools are needed in order to advance human rights across the board. As human rights cannot be sufficiently realized until they are protected by law, many of those tools are made more useful when combined with knowledge of the legal system and processes. Advocacy is a key aspect of social work practice, and therefore social work education provides a solid foundational understanding on the legislative branch of government. However, as all three branches of government have the ability to impact human rights law, social work programs are advised to integrate more opportunities for students to learn about the judicial and executive branches as well. Recognizing that not all programs are positioned to inject forensic social work education into their curriculum, an interprofessional practicum model that integrates social work students into university legal clinics is provided.

This article includes findings from a mixed method survey at a large, public midwestern university following the election of Donald J. Trump as the president of the United States. It examines stude...

There is an increasing pressure calling for legal education’s evolution into building more practical competencies to better prepare law students for practice upon graduation. Collaborative learning between law students and social work students in a clinical setting enriches their respective educations well beyond their respective traditional curricula. By working together, the students learn other methods on how to handle different clients and their unique situations and how to work with someone of a different disciplinary expertise with the same client. This article begins with a law student’s mishandling of an initial client interaction, discusses the advantages of an interdisciplinary education with social work students and then reimagines the initial encounter after the law student has been taught by an interdisciplinary partnership between law and social work schools. Law students gain a better and broader perspective when working alongside social work students to tackle problems that they not only face in a clinical setting, but also will encounter both in practice and in life.

Laws that set an age of consent to engage in sexual behavior are unique in that they are the only laws that can result in a child being both a victim and offender of a crime merely due to age. They are also unique because some states have used these laws in an attempt to reduce teen pregnancy rates. This study was designed to measure and report on public support for the use of age of consent laws (also known as statutory rape laws) to control and punish consensual teenaged sexual behavior, with a focus on Wisconsin and California where the age of sexual consent (18) exceeds the majority of states by two years. Study results indicate that the majority of citizens in these two states do not support the use of the age of consent laws in cases where two same-aged teenagers have engaged in consensual sexual behavior.

Current research suggests a link between negative attitudes toward women and violence against women, and it also suggests that media may condition such negative attitudes. When considering the tremendous and continued growth of video game sales, and the resulting proliferation of sexual objectification and violence against women in some video games, it is lamentable that there is a dearth of research exploring the effect of such imagery on attitudes toward women. This study is the first study to use actual video game playing and control for causal order, when exploring the effect of sexual exploitation and violence against women in video games on attitudes toward women. By employing a Solomon Four-Group experimental research design, this exploratory study found that a video game depicting sexual objectification of women and violence against women resulted in statistically significant increased rape myths acceptance (rape-supportive attitudes) for male study participants but not for female participants.

Female circumcision is a cultural tradition that includes cutting of female genitals without medical necessity. Over 130 million girls and women have been circumcised globally. This article reports on partial findings from a qualitative study that examined the lives of Somali Muslim women who were circumcised. A reoccurring theme of resentment toward North American health care practitioners who condemn the women for having experienced the practice of circumcision in their birth country was found. Discussion will include the physical and social stigma, the complex legal aspects, and ways to deal with female circumcision in a culturally competent manner.