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Professor Ric Curtis’s Research on Forced Marriages Featured in Al Jazeera America Article

Professor Ric Curtis in the Department of Anthropology is featured in an Al Jazeera America article titled, “Till Death Do Us Part: The Forgotten U.S. Victims of Forced Marriage” by Alyana Alfaro. Curtis led a survey funded by the AHA Foundation an advocacy organization founded by vocal women’s rights advocate Ayaan Hirsi Ali, that studied immigrant populations in New York. It revealed that forced marriage is prevalent and undocumented.

To read the full article, click here.

Curtis has more than twenty-five years of experience conducting ethnographic research in New York City neighborhoods. At the Vera Institute of Justice in the late 1980s, he was co-author of a study that examined the effectiveness of New York City’s Tactical Narcotics Team. During the 1990s, while at the National Development and Research Institutes, Inc. (NDRI), he participated in several large studies of injecting drug users and HIV risk networks, and conducted survey and ethnographic research on risk behaviors among young adults in a neighborhood with high rates of HIV and other sexually transmitted infections. At John Jay College, he was the Director of the “Heroin in the 21st Century” project, a five-year ethnographic study of heroin users and distributors in New York City funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA).