Girls in Trouble with the Law (review)

Girls in Trouble with the Law is an engaging, sometimes harrowing, account of the issues facing girls in the contemporary American juvenile justice system. Schaffner intentionally terms these young women “adjudicated” and “court-involved” to step away from what she believes are outdated notions of “female juvenile delinquents” that do not adequately capture the realities of their lives and contacts with court systems. Schaffner hopes to illuminate the contexts in which girls get into trouble, arguing that these structural and psychological factors give a “social logic” to the actions that result in their adjudication. She believes this social logic must be understood in order to create adequate policy solutions to protect and empower girls in trouble with the law.

Throughout her text, Schaffner advocates for programs (in research and in adjudication) that take into account the widespread impact of sexual violence, racism, poverty, family and community disintegration, health crises, demeaning consumer culture, and state apathy on girls’ lives. Policy should work to reduce the disproportionate representation of minorities in the system; attend to the needs of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered teens; and seek to refine gender-specific programming in ways that challenge stereotypes of gender, race, and class. Too often, Schaffner finds, the dedicated adults working with court-involved girls are ill equipped to understand their needs. Like the Progressive reformers of the early juvenile court, they tend to bring with them their own biased views of appropriate girl behavior that are at odds with those of the girls and the communities they serve and are thus met with hostility and resistance.

By crafting an “ethnology of a system,” Schaffner attempts to examine these forces at play in girls’ lives (most often urban, low- or no-income young women of color) through observations of legal and community programs and correctional facilities in California, Colorado, Massachusetts, and Illinois and interviews with forty-two staff members and one hundred court-involved girls ages thirteen to eighteen. Supplementing the interviews are original poems, songs, photographs, and artwork by court-involved girls. Schaffner adds a powerful qualitative narrative to her study that is reminiscent of the work of early twentieth-century sociologist Clifford Shaw, who believed that the use of a child’s “own story” was an invaluable methodology to gain insight into the contexts of juvenile delinquency. Schaffner hopes her work will add to a growing body of feminist scholarship on the long-overlooked topic of girls’ delinquency, best exemplified by pioneering criminologist Meda Chesney-Lind.

In some ways, Schaffner seems to be paying careful attention to history; she draws from the work of historians Steven Schlossman and Mary Odem to highlight the origins of the juvenile court system and early constructions of girls’ deviance, in part because she feels these constructions no longer hold true. In place of the “precocious sexuality” long believed to be the root cause of girls’ delinquency and the source of considerable attention by the court, Schaffner argues that nowadays violence represents the main way girls transgress gender norms. This is a compelling and powerful argument, but Schaffner sometimes struggles to bring her evidence and analysis in line with her claims about fundamental historical change.

For Schaffner, the old view that “boys are violent and girls are sexy” (p. 11) has disappeared because, quite simply, times have changed. Schaffner believes that gender norms have shifted significantly in the century since the juvenile courts were established and are reified by a consumer culture that pushes images of female sexuality and assertiveness on America’s youth. Because early sexual activity is now widespread in teen culture, sexual precocity is less alarming for those responsible for regulating youthful behavior, while violence, on the other hand, is still a wholly unacceptable behavior when perpetrated by girls. Girls’ violence has become the new moral panic, alternatively sensationalized by the media and played down by academia.

While these arguments have merits, Schaffner doesn’t provide much historically specific evidence to support claims about either changing gender norms or...