Wince of the Week, Oct Oct 21-28, 2012 Our EHRP team winced when we read about this in a new study just out from the Georgetown Center on Poverty, Inequality and Public Policy, co-authored by Liz Watson and Peter Edelman:
The typical girl in the system is a non-violent offender, who is very often low-risk, but high-need, meaning the
girl poses little risk to the public but she enters the system with significant and pressing personal needs. The set of
challenges that girls often face as they enter the juvenile justice system include trauma, violence, neglect, mental and
physical problems, family conflict, pregnancy, residential and academic instability, and school failure. The juvenile justice
system only exacerbates these problems by failing to provide girls with services at the time when they need them most.[...]
In some cases, girls who have suffered trauma are re-traumatized by their experiences in the juvenile
justice system.35 Helping these girls heal from trauma and abuse is critically important, but many juvenile
justice agencies lack the knowledge and training about what services are useful to assist these girls in their recovery.–excerpted from “Improving the Juvenile Justice System for Girls“
