The School to Prison Pipeline for Girls: The Role of Physical and Sexual Abuse Education and the Law 24 Children's Legal Rights Journal 2004

24 Child. Legal Rts. J. 56 (2004)
The School to Prison Pipeline for Girls: The Role of Physical and Sexual Abuse

handle is hein.journals/clrj24 and id is 270 raw text is: The School to Prison Pipeline for Girls: The Role of
Physical and Sexual Abuse
by Sandra B. Simkins1, Amy E. Hirsch2, Erin McNamara Horvat, & Marjorie B. Moss4

I. Introduction
Far too often, discussions of the school to
prison pipeline focus solely on boys, considering
only the mechanisms that result in the
imprisonment of young men. In determining
how to truly interrupt the pipeline from school
to prison, separate consideration must be given to
girls. Children who enter the juvenile justice
system often enter the adult criminal justice
system, but both of these systems were designed
to respond to males. Despite a drop in overall
juvenile crime in recent years, there has been an
exponential rise in the number of girls in
detention facilities, jails and prisons; likewise,
arrest rates for girls in almost all offense
categories have outstripped those of the boys
over this same time period.f Many of these new
arrests are occurring at schools. Negative
attitudes towards school and school failure are
powerful predictors of delinquency in girls.6 To
interrupt the pipeline from school to prison for
girls, policy makers must become aware of the
underlying problems that cause girls to do poorly
in school and ultimately lead to the arrests of
girls.
Although the connections between the abuse
women and girls have experienced and their drug
usage and criminal activities are discussed in
recent literature on women and crime7, this study
was conducted in order to better understand the
connections between abuse experienced by girls
and women, their experiences with regard to
education, drug usage, and involvement with the
juvenile and criminal justice system. Two
separate data sets were used: one of girls
incarcerated in the juvenile justice system, and
one of adult women with criminal records and
drug addictions. Semi-structured interviews were
conducted with a total of thirty-five girls and
twenty-six women.
This article will not address how girls spiral
deeper into the system,' but will provide an

overview of girls in the juvenile justice system
based on existing research and discuss findings
concerning the effects of abuse, school failure,
and drug abuse on girls. The article concludes
with a discussion as to how these findings might
be used to lead to further research using larger
samples of girls in the juvenile justice system and
the implications of these findings for changing
the school culture.
1. Overview: Girls and the Juvenile Justice
System
Despite an overall drop in juvenile crime,
girls represent the fastest growing segment of the
juvenile justice population; reexamination of girls
in the juvenile justice system, therefore, is
becoming an issue of national importance.9 Girls'
needs have long been invisible within the modern
juvenile justice system. Although girls represent
one in four juvenile arrests in the United States,
the stereotypical juvenile offender is a violent,
young male.1 Therefore, theories about
delinquent behavior are based on males and
programming within the juvenile justice system
that has been developed to meet the needs of
boys2 with little focus on the lives of girls
involved with the juvenile justice system.
The impact of child abuse and neglect in a
girl's life is one distinct way in which a girl's path
to the juvenile justice system is different from a
boy's.3 Meda Chesney-Lind found that
childhood sexual abuse begins earlier for girls
than for boys, and tends to last longer, resulting
in severe emotional and psychological
dysfunction.4 Furthermore, unlike boys, girls'
victimization and their response to that
victimization is specifically shaped by their status
as young women.15
Girls also experience the juvenile justice
system differently than boys in terms of arrests,
detention, and disposition. First, there is evidence
that girls are being detained for less serious

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