NCJ Number
220719
Journal
Violence Against Women Volume: 13 Issue: 12 Dated: December 2007 Pages: 1229-1248
Date Published
December 2007
Length
20 pages
Annotation
This study explored the relationship between young women adjudicated delinquent in juvenile court who reported suffering inordinate amounts of emotional, physical, and sexual trauma in childhood and adolescence and adolescent girls’ arrests for violent crimes.
Abstract
When researching court-involved girls’ accounts, it is seen how their private anguish affects the public. In their families, friendships, neighborhoods, and schools, young women were provoked to astonishing levels of aggressive assaults. Their injuries were connected to their sexual misconduct as well. Young women who were sexually exploited and witnessed violence in their daily lives came to the attention of juvenile correctional systems with psychiatric diagnoses of “oppositional defiant conduct disorders” and probation conditions regarding “disorderly conduct.” Girls’ involvement in juvenile corrections resulted from interplay between these forces and others, mediated by a less protective culture and more punitive social stance. The study raises important questions for further research about the relationship between violence and female offending. Drawing from a larger study of court-involved girls conducted between 1994 and 2004, interviews were gathered from girls who were being adjudicated delinquent in the juvenile legal system in 22 facilities across the United States. After a brief literature review on child abuse and violence in the lives of youth, the study proceeds to highlight two different contexts where girls’ violence led them to come into the juvenile legal system: lesbian battery and fighting back from sexual harassment. The study then presents a discussion of how witnessing violence is learning violence. References