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Abstract: Can legal empowerment support forcibly displaced people when they face high levels of violence and exploitation and few incentives to report? We study demand for and impact of legal empowerment through a randomized control trial with 1,707 displaced people in Greece. Using an encouragement design, we explore variation in information seeking behavior and the impact of information. At baseline, nearly half of the study participants were unaware of how to seek help after experiencing violence. Comparing generic and personalized legal information against a control, we find a higher demand for generic than personalized legal information. Both improved participants’ knowledge of exploitation under Greek law (0.23–0.7 SD) and increased confidence in responding to violence (0.26–0.57 SD) three months after treatment, but local average treatment effects are larger for personalized information. Impacts on other outcomes were limited. We identify a trade-off between higher uptake of generic information and more effective personalized conversations, with implications for supporting forcibly displaced people.

The Political Science Seminar Series is convened by Rachel Bernhard and Tarik Abou-Chadi. For more information on this or any of the seminars in the series, please contact politics.secretary@nuffield.ox.ac.uk.