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  • Lynn Hecht Schafran, senior vice president of Legal Momentum, a women’s rights group in New York, argued that the problem is rooted in stereotypes and myths about sexual assault. She cited several famous quotes and reports, from 1904 to the present, which questioned the validity of women’s rape claims.
  • The American Bar Association’s Commission on Domestic & Sexual Violence is honoring Legal Momentum’s President and CEO Carol Robles-Román with the 2017 Sharon L. Corbitt Award. The annual award recognizes a lawyer who demonstrates exemplary service to victims of domestic violence, sexual assault and/or stalking, in the spirit of Sharon L. Corbitt.
  • New York, August 1, 2017 - This morning, the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act (SESTA) was introduced in the United States Senate. The bill has bipartisan support spanning the political spectrum.
  • The development worries some advocates working to prevent the sexual exploitation of women and children, who fear Backpage’s new payment system will make it easier to sell vulnerable girls online.“It’s a message to traffickers: ‘Hey, we’ll protect your privacy,’” said Caitlin McCartney, a staff attorney at Legal Momentum, a national nonprofit that’s suing Backpage on behalf of a girl the group says was raped and sold five times after traffickers advertised her on Backpage.“Not everybody has bitcoin,” McCartney said, “but everybody has pretty easy access to gift cards.”
  • Host Heather Stark and Legal Momentum's Gender Justice Fellow, Seher Khawaja, discuss how poverty disproportionately impacts women and how we can better ensure women's economic security in this installment of "3 Women, 3 Ways" on Blog Talk Radio. 
  • In an interview on July 12, Candice Jackson, the acting head of the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR), said that the overwhelming majority of Title IX complaints did not warrant investigation.
  • Carol Robles-Roman heads Legal Momentum, an advocacy group suing to shut down the section of the online bulletin board where children are sold for sex. Robles-Roman says Backpage uses an exploitive business model that pulls in millions.“There should not be a vehicle that has made the trafficking of kids so easy, like ‘hey, do you want to order a pizza, sure, let's do that.’ ‘Hey do you want to order a kid?’ Just as easy." 
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  • Full Measure is a weekly Sunday news program hosted by Emmy award-winner Sharyl Attkisson that focuses on investi-gative, original, and accountability reporting. It airs on local news stations nationwide and streams live online Sunday mornings. Legal Momentum President and CEO Carol Robles-Román appeared on the May 7 episode to talk about how Backpage.com facilitates online sex trafficking of children.
  • The Daily News Headline on April 24 read just like too many others: “Man posing as teen extorted porn out of young girls, authorities allege.”This and other stories continue the same way, laying out the same disturbing pattern: An adult man assumes the false identity of a male teenager, infiltrates a young girl’s social media and convinces her to take nude pictures of herself and send them to him.
  • New York, NY, March 30, 2017,—Utah and Arkansas have enacted the nation’s first pieces of legislation designed to expressly criminalize acts of “sextortion,” or cyber-sexual extortion. The Arkansas statute became law Wednesday, following closely after Utah’s legislation, which was signed by the governor on March 25.
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