Girls in Trouble with the Law

Introduction: Girls Trouble the Law

1 Introduction Girls Trouble the Law Popular moral panics often focus on girls’ and women’s behavior. In the corporate news media and Hollywood films, images of girls and women in crises, such as the unwed pregnant teenager , the welfare cheat, the uncaring, crack-addicted mother, the teen girl in need of an abortion, and the abducted innocent girl child, stimulate civic discourse and outrage. The irony is that most academic studies (as well as policy development and program funding) focus on the situations and experiences of boys and men. In general, sociology is the study of men’s troubles.1 Most books about juvenile law and delinquency (textbooks, ethnographies, theoretical overviews, and federal statistics) contain one chapter, section, or paragraph that addresses issues related to females. Although canonical narratives reveal much about processes of gender, these texts, like others in their fields, rarely made their debut as research on masculinity. Men’s and boys’ experiences are the unspoken standard to which girls’ and women’s lives are compared. The results of the research reported in Girls in Trouble with the Law, however, point to the importance of understanding the conditions, situations, and experiences of the female half of the population in order to generate not only socially relevant theory but effective public policy. The concerns of female juvenile offenders have hovered below the radar of media headlines and of the sociological research agenda. The lack of research on girls’ experience has exacerbated ill-conceived notions of gender as well as misinterpretations of both the statistical data and the accounts of girls’ decisions. A spate of work now, however, features the history of girls’ delinquency and troubles.2 Feminist researchers working in criminology, psychology, and law have quickly amassed reliable social science documenting the experiences of girls’ troubles with 2 Girls in Trouble with the Law the law. This work is aimed largely at interrupting current popular and cynical narratives, such as those concerning the surge in girl-on-girl violence , and at developing instead contemporary theories that reflect girls’ and women’s realities; this ethnography aims to join that body of work.3 Because of an overreliance on incarceration in the last decades of the twentieth century, the situation for girls in the U.S. juvenile legal system deteriorated. Arrests of adolescent girls skyrocketed, and, increasingly , girls were charged with violent offenses. In order to comprehend this crisis, we need a new conversation with girls and about girls, trouble, and the law. We must begin by listening to the voices and experiences of young women who are going through the court system and to consider them as contemporary girls, not as a special kind of boy in the delinquency system and not as if they were girls in the 1950s. We must also keep in mind that the category court-involved girls is neither uniform nor static. When we do hear young women, we can identify various processes at work in their lives. First, the vast extent of emotional injury in the form of sexual and violent assault that young women in this population report experiencing cannot be understated. We can trace the dire social consequences of this unattended psychic trauma, such as their own later sexual and violent offenses, in many of the accounts of court-involved girls. Second, we can trace a pattern relating to young women’s responses to the hyper-sexualized, consumerist culture they inhabit. Third, listening to girls allows a unique view of the conditions under which they are adjudicated delinquent for violent offenses. In the media and among some social scientists, girls’ violence has been framed as an example of how girls violate such gender norms as being nurturing, relational, and internally focused. Girls’ narratives of their involvement with violence indicate a much more complex set of factors at work in their lives. The main argument in Girls in Trouble with the Law centers on the significance of the experiences of low-income girls of color who have been neglected or exploited and who are situated in a larger cultural and political environment that variously ignores, minimizes, derides, or criminalizes their plight. We have been prevented from listening to girls who are in trouble with the law because much of our accepted wisdom about young women—both academic and popular—obviates our hearing them. On the one hand, conventional studies of what is rather colloquially termed juvenile delinquency reveal the necessity for an interdisciplinary inquiry. Except in explicitly feminist texts, criminological work has...