Jagged Justice

It was “a wild and crazy thought,” adolescent specialist Ruth Herman Wells of Woodburn, Ore., recalled, the notion that “maybe, just possibly, girls might have special needs.” With sturdy, grass-roots support, Oregon’s Equal Access for Girls Task Force was born, and in 1993,Oregon became the first state to enact legislation addressing the serious shortage of services for troubled girls.

That was the year Allen Hunt, then director of a residential treatment center for girls in Portland, warned that while girls in distress may not present the same level of terror to the community as delinquent boys, their troubles portend a perilous toll of their own. “It takes awhile for their problems to unfold,” Hunt remonstrated. “In fact, these girls are like time bombs.”

Sponsors of the Oregon bill--which required state agencies to document and correct funding disparities between boys and girls in human services, including juvenile justice--say its very existence was an acknowledgment of a gender-based double standard in juvenile justice. In June, that double standard was reaffirmed when the Justice Department’s Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention--along with Girls Inc., a nationwide membership organization formerly known as the Girls Clubs of America--released “Prevention and Parity,” a report on delinquent girls.

The study offered clear examples of how delinquent girls receive unequal and unfair treatment because of gender:

* Girls are more likely to be detained for lesser offenses, and for longer periods of time. On Feb. 15, 1993, when the juvenile justice office conducted a one-day “Children in Custody” census, 12% of the girls--versus 1% of the boys--were in custody for so-called status offenses like running away.

* Girls are more likely to be incarcerated for violating a court order. Another 1993 census found 12% of incarcerated boys were detained on probation or parole violation, as opposed to 24% of females.

* Most correctional facilities and programs are designed for boys. As a result, girls may be inappropriately placed in adult facilities, in jails with girls who have committed more serious offenses or in mixed-sex facilities with girls and boys who have committed serious offenses.

“Prevention and Parity” also dwelt heavily on the connection between sexual abuse and delinquency in girls. And the report returned repeatedly to its central thesis: Boys are perceived as threatening the community with violent behavior, girls by flouting moral standards. Society therefore is presumed to need protection from boys; girls, in turn, from themselves.

For generations, this dual vision has remained largely unquestioned. On the contrary, the notion that young females required safeguarding formed the legal basis for the status offenses on which most girls still enter the juvenile justice system. But a slow but steady shift toward more violent crimes among girls, coupled with a cautious recognition of the long-term consequences of troubled girls who are left uncared for, has provoked a nascent and potentially profound reassessment of the separate-but-unequal treatment of delinquent girls and boys.

“There have been some changes,” said Meda Chesney-Lind, the University of Hawaii criminologist who is widely regarded as this country’s leading expert on delinquent girls. “Very slowly, some people have begun to realize that some of what was going on in this system was inappropriate.”

Nearly three-quarters of the 678,500 girls arrested in 1994, the most recent year for which FBI statistics are complete, were charged with nonviolent or status offenses. The latter are infractions such as truancy, violating curfew, incorrigibility or running away from home that are peculiar to being a juvenile. Status offenses formed an integral part of the late 19th century notion of establishing a separate justice system for children, said Jan C. Costello, a law professor at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles. Gradually, she explained, courts began distinguishing between status offenses and criminal wrongdoings, “such as stealing a bicycle or blowing your mother away.”

This gender-based line of demarcation went unchallenged for decades. “The idea was that if you were a juvenile, you were supposed to be protected,” Costello said. “Girls, it was assumed, were notoriously in need of being protected, boys being boys and so forth.”

Little has changed: The Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention report found that in 1994, girls were twice as likely as boys to be detained for status offenses. Moreover, girls were detained an average of three to five times as long as boys for these crimes.

The discrepancy stems from a fundamental difference in cultural expectations of boys and girls, said Los Angeles public defender Lisa Greer. “I think there is almost a greater anger that the girls are disappointing the juvenile justice system in a way that the boys are not,” Greer said. She noted a tendency for judges to incarcerate girls on repeat or chronic offenses more quickly.

But one reason for jailing girls is that so few other options exist.

“In terms of sentencing, my resources are very limited,” said David Mitchell, who heads the crowded, chaotic Baltimore Juvenile Court. “I have a whole raft of possibilities for boys,” intervention alternatives that range from work programs to boot camps to community-based support. For girls, “it’s probation or incarceration.” Again, Mitchell said the public fear of male delinquents reduces the choices for girls. Most girls’ facilities are afterthoughts anyway, and “the pressure to have beds for boys is such that it takes from the girls,” he said.

In Los Angeles, Greer also lamented the absence throughout the juvenile justice system of gender-specific developmental training. Judges, prosecutors, advocates are “utterly ill-equipped to derive sound decisions. They’ve had zero developmental training in general, and especially gender-specific,” said Greer, whose caseload is almost exclusively juvenile. One consequence is that “you get extremes at both ends. You get girls prematurely and inappropriately jumped into secure, incarcerated settings--or returned to homes where they are not supervised. There are swings of the response pendulum in both directions, because there are not facilities for these girls.”

The Thread of Abuse

Not surprisingly, the mere suggestion of gender differences in juvenile justice sends many within that system into stratospheric indignation.

“Not in my courtroom!” thundered Judge Roosevelt Dorn, who presides over the L.A. Juvenile Court in Inglewood. “I have very high standards for girls and boys. The same high standards.”

Commissioner James Ballew of Pomona was equally adamant that “I do not treat girls and boys one bit differently.” Peter Reinharz, chief prosecutor for the Family Court of New York City, insisted that girls are judged on precisely the same terms as boys. But he conceded that when it comes to some violent crime, “I think girls are less likely to get detained, because girls are less likely to be seen as threats to someone other than a peer.”

At the L.A. County Probation Department, spokesman Craig Levy sidestepped the dual standard question. Cultural expectations for girls and boys are different, Levy noted. “We believe all along that ‘boys will be boys,’ ” he said. “When boys do something wrong, to some extent we say it’s just due to being a boy. I think we hold out more hope of success for girls. We have higher expectations of girls to be good.”

Society may expect girls to be good. Unfortunately, society is not always good to girls. Intake studies of girls in the juvenile justice system show that between 50% and 70% are sexually, physically or emotionally abused--with the high end on sexual. Many of those who work with delinquent girls place the figure much higher. Certainly, the abuse levels of delinquent girls vastly exceed the federal government’s own estimate that 23% to 34% of young women in the general population have been sexually abused. Comparable figures for young males are more difficult to obtain, since intake surveys of male offenders have not routinely asked about abuse. Many experts believe that for boys, neglect is a more pervasive form of abuse.

Specialists say the rampant abuse plays a key role in crime among girls. Frequently, girls respond to abuse by fighting back or running away. They think with their feet, as more than one provider of social services has observed. Because these actions involve minors, they are categorized as status offenses. Fifty-seven percent of juvenile runaways are females, FBI figures show. A 1994 study by the American Correctional Assn. also found sexually abused girls to be at greater risk than either other runaway girls or runaway boys for engaging in prostitution.

“These are things that girls do that drive judges crazy. They run away and they have sex,” said Laura Axtell, who works with delinquent girls in the Southern states through a group of private residential and treatment programs called the Associated Marine Institutes.

“What I constantly hear from well-intentioned juvenile judges is ‘We have nowhere to send her,’ ” said Lawanda Ravoira, director of a nonresidential, therapeutic counseling program called PACE that serves 1,500 girls at nine locations in Florida. “Because the number of delinquent boys is so much greater, and there’s limited funds, the tendency is to build more facilities for boys.”

So girls who run from their homes are often returned to the very settings they fled. If they run again, they are found to be in contempt of court. In most states, this violation carries a mandatory jail sentence, normally about six months. This kind of behavior can also earn girls charges of incorrigibility or ungovernability. Specialists say such terms are usually code words for excessive sexuality, a description that is virtually never applied to male juveniles.

But while the law interprets such acts as defiance, Axtell offered another perspective. Abused girls will run from anywhere, she said. “They will run in the middle of the night, with no shoes on, by themselves. They are absolutely so resilient--because they are survivors, survivors of abuse.”

By defining repeated runaways as criminals, Chesney-Lind, author of “Girls, Delinquency and Juvenile Justice” (Brooks / Cole, 1992), said most states have “sexualized girls’ delinquency and criminalized girls’ survival strategies.” The thread of abuse weaves through all layers of female delinquency, she said. “It’s the constant theme that the white girls, the black girls, the Latina girls share,” Chesney-Lind said. “Horrific situations of abuse and victimization which we as a society are reluctant to deal with.”

Not Enough Options

Even some well-intentioned attempts to address damage to young women are rife with inequality. Lacking widespread, high-quality prevention programs for girls or rehabilitative efforts that actually rehabilitate, juvenile courts may refer girls to private mental health facilities. Treatment in these locked hospitals or clinics amounts to secure detention. In the vernacular of the justice system, this process is known as “transinstitutionalization.” It is particularly available--and encouraged--for girls whose families have money or insurance coverage to finance their placements.

“We’ve just flipped how we deal with girls and women,” Chesney-Lind said. “In the old days, we didn’t imprison women, we put them in mental hospitals.” Now, she said, adult women are more likely to be sent to jail than they once were, and girls--especially, Chesney-Lind said, white middle-class girls--are more likely to be “voluntarily” committed to private facilities.

In some cases, said Ruth Herman Wells, the mental health approach may be more appropriate than traditional incarceration. “I am not convinced the girls belong in the justice system per se,” said Wells, who runs a program in Woodburn, Ore., called Youth Change that advises teachers and counselors on dealing with troubled children. “They belong in a system that is responsive to girls. The problem with our society is we provide one-gender-fits-all services--and guess which gender that is?”

One result of the 1993 legislation in Oregon was a recent report comparing how various state agencies provide services to boys and girls. Pam Patton, a social worker who helped steer the legislation, said it was “no surprise at all” that the biggest discrepancies for adolescent girls were found within the juvenile justice system.

While numbering 55% of the state’s “street kid” population, girls got fewer than 35% of Oregon’s adolescent corrections and treatment beds, Patton said. “It is a double standard, in that you can’t get in because you haven’t done the ‘right’ crime, and if you do get in, you don’t get the same level of services.” The equal access bill lacks teeth for enforcement, but Patton and others say they are hopeful that state agencies will voluntarily seek to rectify such disparities. If not, Equal Access task force members say they are prepared to file lawsuits to compel equal allocation of state services.

With the public clamoring for tighter sanctions for delinquents, Patton said she hopes future data will strengthen support for early intervention programs for girls.

“There’s a huge percentage of men in the corrections system who were born to teen mothers,” she said. “There’s a huge number of girls who were sexually and physically abused--and a huge number of girls who are runaways and who drop out. They then give birth to a child who ends up in the system. This perpetuates the syndrome. On and on. The best investment, we think, that you can make in public safety is to invest in these young women so you can stop these cycles.”

The government’s “Prevention and Parity,” report also strongly advocated intervention as early as grade school, with the aim of helping girls resolve problems that place them at risk for delinquency. The report also urged that programs be designed specifically for girls. Coed or male-centered programs may shortchange girls’ specific needs and strengths, the report said. Yet a recent survey of potentially promising programs identified just two for girls--and 24 for boys.

In Little Rock, Ark., some of these concepts were taken to heart when voters passed a “Prevention Initiative” in 1993 designating a half-cent city sales tax for an aggressive menu of programs for at-risk youth. For every dollar that the city spends on law enforcement, said Ken Richardson, program specialist for the Youth Initiative Project, it spends a dollar on prevention. Initially, two community-based sites were developed, offering everything from family life health education to truancy prevention to student and parent support groups. One center was for boys, the other, as Richardson politely put it, “for young ladies.” Soon the sites mushroomed, for both genders.

“Most times, we don’t focus enough on the needs of the young ladies. We tend to be reactive, rather than proactive,” Richardson said. “Some of these young people, these young ladies, the community doesn’t give them the opportunity to do something positive. The adults are buying dope from these young people. They’re paying these young ladies for their services as prostitutes.”

At the PACE Center for Girls in Jacksonville, Fla., director Ravoira warned that “in failing to take responsibility for these girls, we are failing as a society as well.” Girls in this culture are marginalized anyway, she said, “but then when you become a girl in the juvenile justice system, you’re even more marginal. These are the girls who are labeled as ‘bad girls.’ They’ve gotten into delinquency, and they get pushed deeper into the system. It’s part of becoming more invisible--and then we can become afraid of these girls.

“We continue to miss the point, that these girls are wanting to be heard. If we don’t hear them in one way, then unfortunately the culture is very definitely pushing them to be heard in a more destructive way.”