Over the past decade and a half, girls’ involvement in the juvenile justice system has increased. Yet the topic remains under-studied among criminologists. The Delinquent Girl is a “state-of-the-field” evaluation that identifies and analyzes girls who become delinquent, the kinds of crimes they commit and the reasons they commit them. The distinguished academics and practitioners who contributed to this volume provide an overview of the research on girls’ delinquency, discuss policy implications and point to areas where further research is critically needed.
Delinquent Daughters explores the gender, class, and racial tensions that fueled campaigns to control female sexuality in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America. Mary Odem looks at these moral reform movements from a national perspective, but she also undertakes a detailed analysis of court records to explore the local enforcement of regulatory legislation in Alameda and Los Angeles Counties in California. From these legal proceedings emerge overlapping and often contradictory views of middle-class female reformers, court and law enforcement officials, working-class teenage girls, and working-class parents. Odem traces two distinct stages of moral reform. The first began in 1885 with the movement to raise the age of consent in statutory rape laws as a means of protecting young women from predatory men. By the turn of the century, however, reformers had come to view sexually active women not as victims but as delinquents, and they called for special police, juvenile courts, and reformatories to control wayward girls. Rejecting a simple hierarchical model of class control, Odem reveals a complex network of struggles and negotiations among reformers, officials, teenage girls and their families. She also addresses the paradoxical consequences of reform by demonstrating that the protective measures advocated by middle-class women often resulted in coercive and discriminatory policies toward working-class girls.
Drawing on the case files of the State Training school of Geneva, Illinois, the author presents a history of delinquent girls in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Focusing on contemporary perceptions of gender, sexuality, class, disability and eugenics, the work examines the involuntary commitment of girls and young women deemed by reformers to be "defective" and shows both the dominant social trends of the day as well as the ways in which the victims of these policies sought to mitigate their conditions.
Traditionally, delinquent girls were considered an anomaly, a rare phenomenon attracting little scholarly notice. Today, more than one in four youth offenders is female, and researchers and practitioners alike are quickly turning their attention and resources to address this challenging situation. Delinquent Girls: Contexts, Relationships, and Adaptation synthesizes what is known about girls involved in delinquent behavior and their experiences at different points in the juvenile justice system. This breakthrough volume adds to the understanding of this population by offering empirical analysis not only of how these behaviors develop but also about what is being done to intervene. Employing multiple theoretical models, qualitative and quantitative data sources, law enforcement records, and insights across disciplines, leading scholars review causes and correlates; the roles of family and peers; psychological and legal issues; policy changes resulting in more arrests of young women; and evidence-based prevention and intervention strategies. Each chapter covers its subject in depth, providing theory, findings, and future directions. Important topics addressed include: Narrowing the gender gap – trends in girls’ delinquency. Girls at the intersection of juvenile justice, criminal justice, and child welfare. Trauma exposure, mental health issues, and girls’ delinquency. Beyond the stereotypes: girls in gangs. Intervention programs for at-risk and court-involved girls. Implications for practice and policy. With its broad scope and solution-oriented focus, Delinquent Girls: Contexts, Relationships, and Adaptation is a must-have volume for researchers, professionals, graduate students, and social policy experts in clinical child and school psychology, social work, juvenile justice, criminology, developmental psychology, and sociology.
The #metoo movement, particularly the horrific Larry Nasser abuse, shows with frightening clarity the vulnerability of young women to male predators; all the Touchtone girls I encountered suffered similar or worse fates. The book is a pilgrimage, a quest story, divided into five sections. Part I explores the authors first year at the facility, the difficulty and eventual success of establishing my group in such a chaotic and contradictory culture. It recreates their writing sessions, and features the vivid, dramatic personalities of the girls who participated as well as the steep learning curve on which she found herself daily. Part II moves swiftly through the trials and victories between the first and last years, and offers brief profiles of three of the residents who held special resonance to the author. During this time she published an award-winning anthology of poems by the girls, a NYC filmmaker created a documentary film, many readings and public performances took place and received several awards for the program. Part III tells of the joint venture with The Hotchkiss School, revealing the differences yet common ground between the two groups of girls.
During the Progressive Era, young working-class women were sometimes jailed for engaging in social and sexual activities that signaled their rejection of Victorian moral standards. These disadvantaged "delinquents" were subject to legal sanctions that were rarely applied to rebellious middle-class girls. As she traces the history of a social crisis that came to be known as the "girl problem", Ruth M. Alexander reconstructs the stories of individual women incarcerated in reformatories who helped redefine female adolescence in the United States. Alexander draws on the rich case files of reformatories at Bedford Hills and Albion, New York. Bringing together writings by the young inmates, letters from their parents, and institutional records, she follows the histories of a hundred girls as they run afoul of the law, are incarcerated, and struggle to reenter society. From the interplay among girls, families, courts, and penal institutions emerges a fascinating picture of class inequality and culture conflict. Alexander finds that most delinquent young women eventually accepted the idea that freedom was best won by conformity and accommodation. In showing how a new social problem was identified and tackled, Alexander also documents the emergence of the modern professions of social work and mental hygiene. Reenacting a key chapter in the transformation of adolescence, The "Girl Problem" contributes to the history of sexuality and social reform through the Progressive Era and beyond.
With an outward gaze focused on a better future, Between Good and Ghetto reflects the social world of inner city African American girls and how they manage threats of personal violence. Drawing on personal encounters, traditions of urban ethnography, Black feminist thought, gender studies, and feminist criminology, Nikki Jones gives readers a richly descriptive and compassionate account of how African American girls negotiate schools and neighborhoods governed by the so-called "code of the street"ùthe form of street justice that governs violence in distressed urban areas. She reveals the multiple strategies they use to navigate interpersonal and gender-specific violence and how they reconcile the gendered dilemmas of their adolescence. Illuminating struggles for survival within this group, Between Good and Ghetto encourages others to move African American girls toward the center of discussions of "the crisis" in poor, urban neighborhoods.
One of the Must-Read Books of 2019 According to O: The Oprah Magazine * Time * Bustle * Electric Literature * Publishers Weekly * The Millions * The Week * Good Housekeeping “There is more life packed on each page of Ordinary Girls than some lives hold in a lifetime.” —Julia Alvarez In this searing memoir, Jaquira Díaz writes fiercely and eloquently of her challenging girlhood and triumphant coming of age. While growing up in housing projects in Puerto Rico and Miami Beach, Díaz found herself caught between extremes. As her family split apart and her mother battled schizophrenia, she was supported by the love of her friends. As she longed for a family and home, her life was upended by violence. As she celebrated her Puerto Rican culture, she couldn’t find support for her burgeoning sexual identity. From her own struggles with depression and sexual assault to Puerto Rico’s history of colonialism, every page of Ordinary Girls vibrates with music and lyricism. Díaz writes with raw and refreshing honesty, triumphantly mapping a way out of despair toward love and hope to become her version of the girl she always wanted to be. Reminiscent of Tara Westover’s Educated, Kiese Laymon’s Heavy, Mary Karr’s The Liars’ Club, and Terese Marie Mailhot’s Heart Berries, Jaquira Díaz’s memoir provides a vivid portrait of a life lived in (and beyond) the borders of Puerto Rico and its complicated history—and reads as electrically as a novel.
