Girls in the Juvenile Justice System
In the past several decades, girls’ arrests and incarceration rates have dramatically increased. Today, girls make up the fastest growing segment of the juvenile justice system in America, according to a report from the Georgetown Center on Poverty, Inequality and Public Policy. They are disproportionately “high need” and “low risk,” meaning that they face more challenges while in the system but do not pose a significant threat to the public.
Although girls have always been outnumbered by boys in the juvenile justice system, the proportion of girls in the system continues to rise. Between 1991 and 2003, girls’ detentions increased by 98 percent, while boys’ increased by 29 percent. According to the National Women’s Law Center, there has been a dramatic increase in the criminalization of girls’ behavior over the past two decades, with girls’ share of arrests increasing by 45 percent.
The juvenile justice system only exacerbates the issues that girls are already facing when they are arrested by failing to provide the services and resources they desperately need. According to the U.S. Department of Justice, there is a lack of effective interventions to help adolescent girls, despite their growing numbers in the system.
The typical girl in the system is a non-violent offender. Girls are increasingly likely to be arrested for non-serious and domestic-related incidents, such as violating curfew or running away from home. Status offenses, offenses that are only a crime when committed by a minor, make up a majority of girls’ arrests.
According to Gender Injustice, a report that details the social contexts driving girls’ behavior and involvement in the juvenile justice system and provides recommendations for alternative approaches to better address their needs, girls are much more likely to have suffered a range of trauma at home before they are arrested.
Many girls enter the system having experienced trauma and violence such as sexual and physical abuse or neglect, and as a result are wounded both emotionally and physically. In 2012, 38 percent of girls’ arrests were connected to reports of violence and abuse in their homes. Girls also exhibit higher rates of mental health problems, higher rates of aggression toward family members and romantic partners, and suffer more negative consequences than boys from their involvement in the justice system.
In the past decade, there has been an increasing amount of effort on the local, state, and federal level to reform the juvenile justice system for girls. One of these efforts is an intervention called ROSES- Resilience, Opportunity, Safety, Education, and Strength — an advocacy program in New York City that aims to increase girls’ access to resources. Pioneered by Dr. Shabnam Javdani, a NYU assistant professor of applied psychology, the program follows girls in a randomized controlled trial.
Pilar Victoria, a ROSES advocacy supervisor, says that the program was established when Dr. Javdani recognized a lack of support for girls and their unique needs while involved in the juvenile legal system. The goal of ROSES, therefore, is to produce positive outcomes through individualized intervention, where the advocacy is tailored to each client’s goals and unmet needs.
Youth are assigned to work one-on-one with advocates for 10–12 weeks. The advocates, all NYU students, go through an intensive, 40-hour paraprofessional training. Once assigned to a girl, the advocates ask them to determine what they feel will help them succeed.
“It is youth-driven, so the youth decide what goals they would like to work on,” says Genevieve Sims, another ROSES advocacy supervisor.
Pilar says that when we think about juvenile justice system involvement, “we tend to think primarily about boys, but we see that when girls become involved in the system, they’re going into facilities that are not addressing their needs as girls.” She explained that when focusing on gender disparities, “girls tend to be punished at much higher rates than boys for behaviors that are gender non-conforming.”
Girls’ risk factors, in combination with a lack of community-based resources and treatment, put them on a path of continued justice system involvement. ROSES aims prevent this, and in its pilot phase produced results that showed greater resiliency and self-efficacy, fewer risk behaviors including violence, crime, and substance use, and decreased distress such as depression, anxiety, and anger.
“What we have found at the macro level is that girls who participated in the ROSES program, compared to girls who did not, have lower rates of recidivism, so they are much less likely to be involved in the juvenile legal system afterwards,” says Pilar.
She explained that ROSES hopes to become established as an evidence-based program, pushing for increased intervention in the population of at-risk, juvenile justice-involved adolescent girls. “Ideally, we would like ROSES to be offered by the courts as alternatives to incarceration for girls.”
