Persistent Paternalism: The Instantiation of Gendered Attributions in the System Response to Girls

Abstract

Prior research suggests that the juvenile legal system does too little to address the sources and underlying reasons for girls’ court referrals. Drawing on attribution theories, the current study examined perspectives that characterize the response of the system to girls’ behaviors. Data from this study were derived from a multimethod, qualitative study on system-involved girls. We find that court actors hold gendered attributions of girls’ delinquency, in turn informing their decision-making about how to treat and sanction girls. Paternalism remains a persistent feature in how the system locates, defines, and responds to girls through varying gendered attributions. The findings lend further support to attribution perspectives that suggest implicit gender-biases influence court actor decision-making, exacerbating the challenges girls face in and out of the juvenile legal system. By extension, this study offers concrete policy and practice implications for systems change and improving its response to girls.

INTRODUCTION

The juvenile court response to girls has been critiqued as inadequate and characterized as perpetuating gender-based disparities in delinquency consequences despite decades of legislative reform and research supporting the use of gender-responsive approaches and advocacy to decriminalize offenses for which girls are overrepresented (e.g., Cobbina et al., 2008; Javdani et al., 2011). Even with these efforts, courts have continued to criminalize girls’ status-based behaviors (e.g., running away, truancy, curfew violations) through bootstrapping practices (e.g., technical violations) and probation orders that ask girls to comply with programming designed for boys (Javdani et al., 2011). Furthermore, exemptions in federal policy that allow system actors to exercise discretion are systematically employed for girls to justify a more severe court response when they perceive girls’ own safety is at risk (Javdani, 2019). This pattern results in a court response that counters rehabilitative mandates and undermines its ability to address the reasons for girls’ referrals to court. The possibility that court responses may reify paternalism and render girls’ subjugation at the intersections of gender, race, and class invisible is critical to investigate given that girls who come into contact with the system are disproportionately of color, poor, and LgBTQ+ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer (or sometimes questioning), and others), and pose little threat to public safety (Chesney-Lind et al., 2008; Irvine-Baker et al., 2019).

Despite scholarly advances to describe the inadequacy of court responses to girls, contemporary research on system-involved girls does not explore why and how this response occurs so robustly and persists over the multiyear life course of girls’ court trajectories. Thus, research is needed to identify why and how courts systematically perpetuate gender-based disparities and unpack how biases in understanding and responding to girls’ delinquency and victimization lead to inadequate system responses. In this article, we explore how gendered attributions—centered on paternalism—manifest in actors’ perceptions of girls and the contexts in which their delinquency emerges. We do so through employing and extending attributions theory (Bridges & Steen, 1998) to examine whether scholarship can explain the systems’ response to girls by pinpointing the attributions that court actors systematically employ, especially during legal decision-making moments rife with subjective discretion.

THEORETICAL FRAMING AND REVIEW OF THE LITERATURE

Descriptive patterns suggest that girls’ court outcomes are influenced by attributions regarding their behavior. A systematic review of legal response patterns underscores that girls who exhibit gender norm-violating behaviors are more likely to receive harsher punishments from the legal system, including longer sentences, compared with their male counterparts (Javdani et al., 2011). Some evidence exists for gender-based leniency in the legal response to girls, but this seems to be limited to first-time offenders who exhibit gender-congruent/gender typical behaviors, rooted in middle-class, White norms, and conform to these stereotypes of appropriate girlhood at early stages of criminal processing (Epstein et al., 2017; Javdani et al., 2011). Despite these general patterns documenting biases in the legal response to girls, few studies have empirically examined the instantiation or reproduction of these biases in the perceptions of actors responsible for making discretionary decisions about girls’ legal outcomes.

Actor attributions represent one empirically supported framework from which to understand these perceptions. In their formative paper, Bridges and Steen (1998) investigated attributional stereotypes and found that court officers’ perceptions regarding the cause of delinquency differ greatly between White versus youth of color, and these differences had implications for risk assessments and sentencing recommendations. Although these findings have been replicated, we note two specific limitations in the contemporary literature. First, there has been little empirical examination of attributional stereotype theories in reference to system-involved girls. Where these empirical investigations have occurred, they suggest that actors apply broad, individual-focused, stereotypical thinking to understand girls’ (and boys’) behaviors. For instance, one study examined probation officers’ case files of system-involved youth and found that probation officers were more likely to make positive attributions for individual boys’ (e.g., accepts responsibility) and made more negative attributions about girls’ contexts and their histories of abuse (Mallicoat, 2007). Gaarder and colleagues (2004) interviewed juvenile probation officers and provided rich evidence of court actors’ stereotypical perceptions that girls are more difficult to work with than boys (e.g., describing girls as “manipulative” and “promiscuous”). Burson and colleagues (2019) found that actors largely viewed individual girls as dramatic and incompetent (i.e., individual-focused attributions) and rarely referenced structural attributions like poverty, racism, and community violence (Burson et al., 2019).

Research has also identified that system actor perceptions of system-involved girls shift for girls of color. Black girls are often perceived as less innocent and more culpable and adult-like than White girls (Epstein et al., 2017). These studies provide initial support for attributional theory but highlight a need for scholarship to extend this work beyond blame attributions and toward a more nuanced understanding of how actors with decision-making authority define the problem of girls’ delinquency. A key challenge within this area of scholarship is that it conceives of gender as an individual-level attribute and does not advance structural understandings about how the system responds differently and more problematically for girls of color, girls within the welfare system, girls in poverty, and gender nonconforming girls.

Second, attributions theory focuses primarily on the perceived cause of behavior. In this article, we extend this theory by incorporating a fuller analysis of the dimensions through which actors may define and understand girls’ delinquency. Drawing from ecological theory (Caplan & Nelson, 1973) as applied to girls’ delinquency (Javdani, 2013), we advance a framework that brings five areas of social problem definition into focus to identify (a) the location of the cause of deviant behavior, (b) attribution of blame for that behavior, (c) implied target of intervention or solution for how to “fix” the behavior, (d) characterization of the role of context, and (e) visibility of structural inequity and rights in framing the behavior and subsequent responses. Consequently, this framework allows for our classification of attributions into person-centered, person-mediated, and ecological frameworks (Javdani, 2013). Figure 1 illustrates how these varying perspectives describe how the social problem of girls’ delinquency is defined and imply the degree to which context is implicated in the development of girls’ delinquency.

Figure 1:

Social Problem Definition Conceptual Model based on Javdani (2013).

SOCIAL PROBLEM DEFINITIONS AS AN EXTENSION OF ATTRIBUTION THEORIES

From the person-centered perspective, the problem is located directly within the individual. The cause of delinquency is theorized to arise directly from the abnormal thoughts, feelings, and actions of individual girls. Individuals’ historical contexts or the contexts in which their behavior arises are characterized as relatively unimportant, or important only to the extent that they further activate the behavioral tendencies that already exist within girls’ minds and bodies. It follows that blame for delinquency is attributed almost exclusively to individuals and thus, the target of change is the individual girl. In this framework, structural inequities and infringement of rights are invisible. For example, girls characterized as having impulsive tendencies and therefore “acting without thinking” represents a person-centered perspective.

From the person-mediated perspective, the problem is theorized to have developed due to an individual’s contexts. While the role of context is central to this framework, these contexts are characterized as important to the extent that they have “damaged” the minds and bodies of girls. Thus, the direct cause of delinquency is attributed to girls who have been broken by their environments because of passive exposure to, or active seeking out of, risky contexts. This implies that the individual-level characteristics of girls mediate the relationship between risky contexts and delinquent behavior. Importantly, these contexts can be proximal or distal in a person-mediated framework, so long as the conceptualization defines context as important only to the degree that it negatively affects individuals. The attribution of blame is situational, as this framework ultimately implies that contexts (e.g., broken families, broken schools) have damaged individual girls—suggesting that the target of change remains at the individual level. Structural inequities and infringement of rights may be alluded to but are conceptualized as peripheral to problem behavior. For example, girls are characterized as having experienced trauma at home, resulting in their reduced ability to form healthy attachments, and therefore, “seeking out risky relationships” represents a person-mediated perspective.

Both person-centered and person-mediated frameworks center the identification of differences between delinquent girls and other youth (e.g., greater traumatic symptoms) and attempt to explain these differences as the cause of the problem. In contrast, from an ecological perspective, the problem is located directly in sociostructural contexts. While this perspective recognizes girls’ behavior is due to a myriad of reasons, it centers institutions and structures that instantiate differential access to opportunity, allow differential access to rights, and limit social power unequally based on social status or group membership. As such, this perspective conceptualizes individuals as actors faced with navigating these sociostructural and institutional inequities and frames any individual’s behavior as secondary to the ecological context in which that behavior emerges. Thus, the attributions of delinquency implied by this framework are structural, and the target of change is the sociostructural and institutional context. For instance, the allegation of “incorrigibility,” for which girls can be formally charged, can be viewed as a subjective “catch-all” that punishes girls for engaging in gender-nonconforming behaviors (e.g., not listening, being “disrespectful”). From the ecological perspective, girls’ behaviors are not the central problem; the category of “incorrigibility” is construed as the problem, representing a gender-bias in the response of the juvenile justice system that instantiates and perpetuates girls’ subjugation. Figure 1 provides our conceptual model, highlighting the location and attribution of blame for girls’ behavior, the extent to which context is prioritized in the definition, and the implications for addressing female juvenile delinquency (e.g., the target of change).

This framework allows for a contemporary investigation of the historical critique advanced by feminist criminologists: that the juvenile court response is paternalistic, problematic, and lacks attention to the gendered pathways that push girls into contact with the system. Furthermore, we conceptualize girls’ delinquency within the context of patriarchy and investigate whether and how this sociostructural lens applies to actors’ understanding of girls’ behaviors. This approach contributes to criminological theory and informs whether and how paternalism shapes the legal lives of girls through system actors (Schaffner, 2006).

CONCEPTUALIZING GENDER AS A STRUCTURE

For decades, social scientists and feminist criminologists have contended that gender should not solely be conceptualized as an individual-level variable that functions to signal information about the characteristics or experiences of individuals. This way of characterizing gender serves to “group” individuals into their respective gender categories, leading to scholarship that serves to examine differences between males and females (Anderson, 2005; Cobbina et al., 2008). In contrast, psychological, criminological, and sociological research has documented how gender operates not only as an individual-level grouping characteristic but also as a structural context that organizes and influences social life and decision-making (e.g., Cobbina et al., 2008; Javdani et al., 2011). This way of characterizing gender underscores the different social norms, roles, and hierarchies ascribed to an individual’s gender and can produce scholarship that unpacks the social meaning of behaviors and the influence of girls’ subjugated roles on their characteristics and experiences.

Most often, research in criminology tends to assess gender as an individual attribute rather than a social structure (Cobbina et al., 2008; Javdani, 2013). Empirical research demonstrates there are multiple pathways to legal system involvement among girls, including individual differences as an important set of indicators to understanding the variability in those pathways (see, for example, Brown et al., 2021). However, certain aspects of the justice system’s response to female offending, because of its focus on gender as an individual-level attribute, have had disproportionate and iatrogenic effects on women and girls as documented by policies and practices (e.g., relabeling status offenses, drug policy, arrest policies for domestic violence) that have led to the increase of system-involved girls over the last few decades (Javdani et al., 2011). given the wide scholarly and national consensus that girls who are system-involved represent low levels of threat to public safety and are disproportionately confined for status offenses (i.e., behaviors like running away from home, curfew violations, truancy that can only be deemed crimes because they are committed by a minor) and technical violations of probation (Puzzanchera & Ehrmann, 2018), it is important that scholarship address gender as structural context to develop better responses for women and girls. That is, we cannot focus solely on girls’ individual behaviors to understand how and why girls’ delinquency emerges; we must also examine the attributions of girls by administrators and frontline service providers and how those attributions can be damaging and further perpetuate girls’ system involvement (e.g., Zahn et al., 2009).

Indeed, from a structural perspective, researchers have identified multiple ways the court uses paternalistic practices in their response to girls through staff perspectives and actions such as punishing girls for incorrigibility (Chesney-Lind et al., 2008). For example, girls are more likely than boys to have status offense petitions filed and be adjudicated for less serious offenses, but are as likely as boys to receive out-of-home placement—practices labeled as a form of “judicial paternalism” (Spivak et al., 2014). As the court was designed for boys, it is not surprising when gendered processes play out as patriarchy centers the belief that delinquency is the world of boys and requires the system to be set up to respond to boys’ behaviors and needs (Nanda, 2011).

Conceptualizing gender as a social structure that also organizes how current practices and policies sustain gender inequities in the justice system is crucial. For example, a disproportionate share of girls who encounter the justice system are girls of color whose lives are embedded in the intersection of multiple axes of sociostructural (e.g., gender, race, sexual orientation) and institutional (e.g., concentrated poverty, school pushout) oppression (Javdani et al., 2011; Schaffner, 2006; Zahn et al., 2009). Indeed, girls of color make up 63% of all girls who are held in carceral facilities (Puzzanchera & Ehrmann, 2018). Although existing scholarship highlights the gendered pathways of girls encountering the system, as well as the response of the system toward girls’ offending, less is understood about the experiences of individual actors within the system. These experiences are important because of the discretion individual actors hold over youth at all points of contact (e.g., police officers, probation officers, judges). In addition, scholars are pushing the field to adopt an intersectional lens that also contextualizes gender as it intersects with race/ethnicity, social class, and sexual orientation (Irvine-Baker et al., 2019). Understanding how actors perceive girls has many implications for system processing, the culture within the system, and strategies for intervention with girls and, thus, is the focus of this article.

LINKING PATERNALISM IN THE JUVENILE LEGAL SYSTEM AND SOCIAL PROBLEM DEFINITION

The juvenile legal system has historically functioned as a paternalistic setting embedded within a system of social regularities that demand conformity among its occupants. While these structures have been theorized about, we have limited knowledge about the extent to which system actors espouse paternalistic views about girls’ delinquency, which could represent a contemporary instantiation of paternalism in the system. Furthermore, although some empirical work supports the notion actors hold individual-level blame attributions about girls and especially girls of color, we know little about the specific manifestations of these attributions. This limits our gender-sensitive theoretical conceptualizations and our ability to inform practical considerations. Scholarship suggests that it is critical to understand the ideological roots of how social problems such as delinquency are defined, as they directly affect the ways in which systems and its actors not only perceive/understand girls’ delinquency, but also the menu of options that are then institutionally deemed fit to respond to the social problem. This article aims to expand our discourse on justice-involved girls by examining critical aspects of court actors’ perceptions about why girls’ delinquency arises, where they locate blame, and how they conceptualize potential solutions for girls. This approach, in turn, allows us to understand how gender-salient biases may dictate the social response to girls.

THE CURRENT STUDY

Feminist scholars have yet to systematically attempt to understand the connection between actors’ attribution of girls and how they conceptualize the behavior of girls. The focus of the current study is to examine the attributions system actors make of girls’ delinquency, the interaction between the system’s paternalism and girls’ pathways, and the frameworks inherent in their narratives. Our study attempts to understand biases embedded in the court response to girls through systematically investigating the perception of its actors. Prior research demonstrates gendered biases, but does not expand on exactly how this bias manifests among system actors. This study investigates these patterns to advance our knowledge around contemporary court responses to girls and attributions of risk, and develop an ecological understanding of female delinquency through examining how court actors attribute girls’ risk and safety.

METHOD

Data from this study were part of a broader, multimethod, qualitative research project aimed to examine how court practitioners detect and respond to the unique risk factors and needs of adolescent girls involved with the juvenile justice system. The research site included a single midsized juvenile court in the Midwestern United States. This court system processes approximately 300 new youth annually—of which about 30% are female. Data collection was conducted over a 6-month period and consisted of two phases that produced three data sources. The first author had an existing relationship with the court through a previous multiyear research and evaluation partnership.

DATA COLLECTION: PHASE I

The first phase involved interviewing court staff in the county of interest (e.g., program managers, judges, probation officers, mental health providers) using a census sampling frame of the entire juvenile and family division. This procedure yielded a final purposive sample of 39 participants with a 92.9% response rate. All interviews with probation officers (n = 24) included a follow-up portion of the interview in which they discussed a specific girl on their caseload. The interview format was semistructured and primarily focused on the context of girls’ involvement with the justice system and how the court responds to girls’ juvenile delinquency. The demographic composition of the county is predominantly White (approximately 70%); however, 65% of caseloads were girls of color. girls were primarily involved with the system for status offenses, most notably truancy from school and low-level property offenses. Person-related offenses most often involved simple assaults or domestic violence.

Interviews With Court Actors

In-depth, semistructured interviews were conducted with 39 juvenile system actors, the majority of whom were frontline service providers (e.g., probation officers, mental health personnel), program managers, court administrators, and judges. The participants were predominantly women (61.5%) and White (79.5%), and all participants had a bachelor’s degree with the majority having an advanced degree (59.0%) in fields such as psychology, social work, and law. On average, participants had worked in juvenile legal system settings for approximately 13 years (M = 13.35 years, SD = 7.94 years) ranging from 1 to 40 years of work experience. The interviews ranged from 24 to 96 min and, on average, were an hour long. Interviewees were asked about needs of girls in their court system and patterns of service provision. They shared their perspectives on the context of girls’ delinquency (e.g., their pathways into the system) and system responses (e.g., sanctions, services) and discussed the risk factors and needs they found most pressing to address with girls. The full interview protocol is available from the authors.

Case Discussions With Probation Officers

Approximately two thirds (61.5%) of the actors interviewed were juvenile probation officers. Each probation officer was asked to select a girl from their current caseload (or recent if they did not have a girl on their current caseload) and answer a series of questions about the girl including the context of her legal system involvement (e.g., pathways, charges), risk factors, needs, and the types of programs she has received as well as the probation officer’s perception of the effectiveness of the court’s intervention strategies.

DATA COLLECTION: PHASE II

The second phase of data collection involved observing staff meetings in which actors discussed cases of girls and made decisions regarding placing them in out-of-home facilities or, in a few instances, to discuss providing more intensive probation services. Staff meetings always included program managers, the court administrator, juvenile probation officer(s) assigned to the case, the court mental health providers, contracted community-based service providers relevant to the case, and detention staff. Meetings were purposefully sampled so all cases involving female youth (n = 12) were observed over 6 months. The data collection format was unstructured where the lead author took detailed field-notes during and immediately following the meetings as audio recording was not permitted. The lead author’s familiarity with the research setting over several years allowed for clear designations of staff and their roles. The use of these three different sources of data allowed for an examination of convergence across actor attributions about girls in their interviews, how probation officers documented girls’ experiences and needs in their case files, and how these perspectives were enacted in the decision-making process through the observation data.

DATA ANALYSIS

The initial coding process involved multiple readings of all interview transcripts, case discussion transcripts, and observation notes to identify and code passages in all three data sources that described girls’ behavior and attributions of risk. For example, these included all passages that referenced girls’ propensity for harming themselves or engaging in risky behavior or needing to place a girl in a secure facility. The purpose of this first phase of analysis was to develop an initial dataset that included all references to these attribution categories for further examination. After the data were initially coded down, we utilized a two-prong approach to data analysis. First, we used consensus coding (a deductive approach with the three a priori categories—person-centered, person-mediated, and ecological) to understand the data in these initial broad categories, anchored by attributions theory. This deductive, consensus building approach asked whether and how the description and distribution of the data fit our theoretical framework of problem definition/attribution. Once three independent coders completed coding all text that referenced attribution to girls’ behaviors, a reconciliation process was used to reach consensus within and across each theoretically deduced conceptual grouping. The Cohen’s kappa coefficient for the initial round of coding was .76 when pooled and weighted across the three deductive coding categories. To address disagreements in each of the three categories, we used a consensual qualitative approach for data reconciliation (Hill, 2012). This process involved identifying all passages in which there was disagreement as to attributional category, discussing each disagreement, refining the definitions of each of the three attributional categories and decision rules, recoding the data as a team, and subsequently reaching 100% consensus across each of the categories. Any text without attributions was not included in the final analysis.

Once we achieved consensus on all the text that could be categorized as either person-centered, person-mediated, or ecological, we engaged in further analysis within and across each of these larger theoretically deduced attributions to examine any subthemes within person-centered, person-mediated, and ecological attributions. Second, we used a thematic analysis approach to make meaning of these codes and synthesize them. We selected this method as thematic analysis is a flexible approach well-suited for a variety of questions, allowing researchers to focus on the data in several ways, including reporting both semantic and latent meanings and the assumptions that underpin them (see Braun & Clarke, 2006). This allowed a process to generate themes “up” from the data (within and across the broad codes from Prong 1) that are more reflexive, generative, and nuanced.

RESULTS

Our analysis revealed the presence of person-centered, person-mediated, and ecological attributions in the narrative of all system actors’ interviews and the court observations. Actors’ narratives heavily relied on person-centered (84.6% of actors) and person-mediated (100% of actors) social problem definitions of female juvenile delinquency and less frequently on ecological explanations (41.0% of actors). Each attributional theme was comprised of multiple subthemes that we detail below. Importantly, while person-mediated attributions are present for all actors who participated in this study, and implicate context, ultimately these attributions converge with person-centered attributions in that they both render girls as the target of change.

The findings section is structured to describe and contextualize each of the above outlined social problem definitions. We present exemplary quotes from interview and observation data that illustrate the framing of female delinquency, as well as the implied solutions. Table 1 provides the frequency of coded text across attributional categories relative to framework by actors, themes, and additional illustrative quotes with individual actors as the unit of analysis. Actors most frequently relied on person-mediated attributions followed by person-centered attributions. There was a more limited use of ecological explanations of risky behavior and the contribution of social systems influencing girls’ involvement with the court. These frequencies represent the number of actors who had at least one attribution coded within that category rather than the number of codes. Most practitioners used multiple types of attributions (i.e., several person-centered explanations). Moreover, these are not mutually exclusive categories as most practitioners used at least two different frames to explain girls’ delinquency.

TABLE 1:

Summary of Coding by System Actor

Category and subthemes	Frequency (n = 39)	Exemplary coded text
Person-centered Subthemes: Impulsivity, self-worth, risky sexual behavior, personality	33 (84.6%)	The girls I’m more like, you can’t be gone all night. I worry about you. You cannot be out there. There’s so many things that could happen. So I feel like the girls I do get more protective of in more like the harmful situations they’re putting themselves in, to get assaulted or, you know, to get hurt, to get pregnant, to get STDs. I’m always on the girls about that. When they come in with hickies on their neck, I hate that. I’m always like, I think it’s so disrespectful that they allow somebody to mark them up like that. [. . .] I’m always talking to them about, like, self-respect and self-worth. You will see the judges, just like we do, place the girls because they’re a danger to themselves or others, for their own safety or for their mental health issues or, you know, whatever those issues are. And put them in the group home or put them out of their home or, you know, put them in the youth center because they’re females versus the boys doing the same. You’ll see the boys act out more in anger or towards each other or, you know, towards somebody else. And you won’t see, you know, well, I’m gonna put you in the group home for your own good because I’m afraid that you’re gonna be dead tomorrow. You don’t see that with the boys. So I think that that’s how they’re treated differently [. . .] it’s more of the risk-taking behaviors and the risk that they put to themselves, as a reason for placement. I also then do see it as a risk to the community, but ultimately the girls that are in placement at this point are more of a risk to themselves [. . .] Versus the boys, we’ll see them as being more of a risk to the community with their actions and their behaviors. So risk to themselves would be running away, having sex with older men, getting sexually molested or raped, using pretty significant drugs and alcohol, mental health issues. But again, if they have a mental health issue and they’re taking the risky behaviors, then they’re more of a risk to themselves. I have quite a lotta girls who are self-harmers.
Person-mediated Subthemes: Broken relationships (families, peers, romantic partners), trauma, neglect, abuse	39 (100%)	I would say that, looking at it, family culture, because the parents experienced the same thing, they’re gonna be doing the same thing. Like as parents you raise your kids similarly to how you were raised. And so if you were raised battered, beaten, and all these other things, you are going to reach out to the same people that are gonna do the same things to your kids if you don’t have intervention. And a lot of these parents of these teen girls didn’t have any intervention to deter them as parents from exposing their kids to the same thing. But I would say that there are a lot of neglect factors that would be involved with all of the youth, but in my experience, particularly female youth. But then again truancy could be strictly because they had a bad experience early on in school. But this cuts across for all kids. Maybe they’re not that well adapted to the school environment so they had a bad experience.
Ecological Subthemes: Systems’ responses, gendered social forces	16 (41.0%)	I do think girls are in a little bit more of a vulnerable position in society than boys are. It’s just unfortunate, but that does seem to be where they are. And especially in [name of city]. I think it’s cultural and it depends on maybe your geographic area and your socioeconomic area. But here in [name of city], with the low socioeconomic folks that we see, again, that’s not 100% for sure, but that they are vulnerable. I think it’s our culture as a whole. Our culture feels like girls need to be protected, sometimes against themselves. I don’t feel like it’s specifically the court, I feel like it’s our culture.

Note. The unit of analysis is individual actor in which the frequencies represent the number of interviewed actors who had at least one attribution coded within that category.

PERSON-CENTERED ATTRIBUTIONS

The second most common attributions articulated by system actors were person-centered explanations of delinquency (84.6% of actors used at least one person-centered attribution). Within this theoretically deduced theme, we noted four emergent subthemes of person-centered explanations that locate the problem of delinquency within individual girls—due to girls’ personality traits, self-esteem, impulsivity, and risky sexual behavior. The targets of change from person-centered attributions are girls themselves with limited or no attention to the need for contexts needing to also change. One actor described a girl’s inability to self-regulate emotions and sexual promiscuity as her pathway to delinquency. Consequently, given these person-centered attributions, this actor is focused on “conversations” with this girl to intervene in what they believe is the necessary target of change (i.e., reducing her risky sexual behavior):

You know, so I think a lotta that is she just has that history of not being able to control her emotions or self. And again that’s after a few years of treatment. She’s a kid that’s, you know, tired of therapy ‘cause she’s had it so much with different people. And again, she goes back to my mom’s not changing so what’s the point. You know, my mom won’t be on it so what’s the point. So I think with her at this point it’s kind of progressed to just stepping into that role for anybody else ‘cause she won’t do it. When she’s with another guy her sexual promiscuity goes down. But she needs to be with a guy. So that’s our kinda conversations right now is, how do you break up with this person that you’re saying is bad for you and be Ok with not having a boyfriend. And that’s scary for her.

In line with attributional theory, person-centered attributions rendered girls’ decisions and motivations to change key aspects of their individual traits and behaviors as crucial to interrupting delinquency:

But there was definitely a clear difference between, like, I’m angry, I’m not gonna do this, to this really sucks, but maybe I’ll get some benefit out of it. Or there were other girls that were, like, I want to be there, I want to do this for myself, I want to get outta my house. And I think on the spectrum, those girls always did better. They weren’t constantly fighting it. Not to say that the girls that were really angry and didn’t want to come couldn’t be successful. It was just a longer process. But I think the girls that wanted, that were motivated to kinda make changes in themselves and kind of their environment, I think were really long term more successful than some of the other girls.

Notably, in the context of a system where pathways to delinquency are largely understood as a result of individual failings, actors also implicated how they are socialized within the system to organically rely on person-centered attributions. For example, their own training on reducing recidivism defines and locates emotional or behavioral problem within individual girls and requires girls to change how they think, feel, and act:

You know, when I first started here in Truancy Court there that we used, and I can’t remember what it was called, but it did revolve around a lotta that, about building self-esteem and what not, but we got away from that because it wasn’t evidence based, there wasn’t any, you know, best practice curriculums being taught with that. Really what it focused on is decision making and, you know, how your thinking affects your feelings and what not. Which I think that it is a very important part in what we’re talking about here, you know, but there’s also to change the thinking you have to be empowered on your own. You have to believe in yourself and be a powerful person, or woman in this case, you know, to be able to think in those terms of, you know, I don’t have to go with them, I don’t have to, you know, and have sex with this person to make ‘em love me. You know, things such as that. Things that go along with the insecurities that people have, why they seek out weak superficial attachments, you know.

In other words, we contend that the system, with its focus on “fixing” and “rehabilitating” youth, also cultivates person-centered attributions that naturally locate individual youth as targets of change in reducing the problem of delinquency (for more quotes, see Table 1).

PERSON-MEDIATED ATTRIBUTIONS

The dominant narrative presented by juvenile court actors were person-mediated attributions (100% of actors used at least one person-mediated narrative). From this attributional perspective, the problem of delinquency emerges because of girls’ exposure to risky context(s). Although context(s) were invoked as locations of the delinquency, ultimately the targets of change are still girls. These narratives included both direct or passive exposure to risky contexts (e.g., experiences of sexual abuse, witnessing violence in families or neighborhoods) or how girls may actively seek out risky contexts (e.g., relationships with older men) because they have been affected by the first risky content (e.g., damaged relationships with a parent), which in turn influences delinquent behavior. System actors frequently identified how girls posed a higher risk to themselves than a threat to community safety. These findings are similar to previous studies that have noted harsher sanctions (e.g., detention) for lower level offenses (e.g., running away) for girls in the system. Namely, stakeholders routinely engaged in “person-mediated” problem definitions about girls’ delinquency. While these perspectives often recognized girls’ trauma contexts, they also reveal how paternalistic messages about girls influence how the system, and its actors, define and respond to girls’ delinquency.

Person-mediated attributions were reflective of four subthemes: broken relationships (families, peers, romantic partners), trauma, abuse, and neglect. Many of the person-mediated narratives heavily focused on the proximal context of relationships driving girls’ risky behavior (e.g., the girl is bad because of the relationships she is in). One actor described risky peer relationships, particularly those with other girls, as key drivers of girls’ delinquency:

A lot of it is assault charges with girls [. . .] I’d say at least half of them are assault that I have on my caseload. Sometimes it is stealing, just because a lot of girls will get together, especially if you have more of a dominant girl and they want to impress their peers, so then they will do something like go out the to store and be like “hey, watch this, I’m gonna steal this” and be the leader of the group. We had a couple of girls like that too.

Girls’ relationships with romantic partners, seeking out relationships with older men, and/or engaging in risky sexual behavior (e.g., not using protection) were also discussed as a problematic relational context that causes girls’ delinquency:

At one point he was trying to convince her to, she has a birth control implant, and he was trying to convince her to take it out cause he wanted to have a kid. You know, I finally have her at a position in life where she thinks she doesn’t want a kid anymore. And she’s having that conversation with him, but it caused an argument. You know, he’s 18, she’s 16, and he’s pressuring her to do that. And at one point she thought she was pregnant. Then she thought she had a miscarriage. When she told him he called her a murderer. And said just nasty things like that to her. They’re constantly fighting. It doesn’t sound like there’s much happiness [. . .] Other than it gives you somebody to hang out with. And she doesn’t have any responses. It’s really just that someone’s there and someone cares about me. ‘Cause she doesn’t feel cared about by anybody.

Finally, girls’ families were consistently referenced as a broken relational context that creates and facilitates delinquency. Dysfunctional relationships with mothers were a common narrative in court actor attributions of risk. For example, one probation officer described how “she was she was raised in that environment. Her mom is very abusive. Even now just kind of emotionally abusive towards her [. . .] and so I think that led to a lot of her substance abuse too.” Other actors described how system-involved girls often had a “best friend” (i.e., nonparental) relationship with their mother, which was viewed as problematic. As another participant described,

A lot of them have a friendship relationship . . . that line is very blurred. They don’t have the “nope, I am your parent first.” They want to be best friends and they want to make sure that they don’t dislike them and that they aren’t mad at them and so you will see a lot of times when you ask the question “why are you allowing their boyfriend to stay the night?” And you know they’re sexually active. And the answer is “Well I don’t want her to be upset with me” or “Well I mean it’s not that big of a deal she’s on birth control.” So it is more of that friendship I think. That friendship dynamic that the mom wants to hang on to and of course the daughter is like okay yeah you can be my best friend and I’m good with that because you let me have my boyfriend over and go to my boyfriend’s house or maybe smoke with me, drink with me. And I think that line is huge in the sense of being able to parent effectively and where the daughter ends up—if she ends up in the system or not.

These examples highlight how court actors describe “broken” relationships as a core problem for girls. Within their descriptions of attributions of risk, actors frequently proposed ways to fix the risky contexts that mediate girls’ delinquency. For example, one court actor described,

Disconnected kids steal cars. Disconnected kids engage in high-risk behavior. And disconnected kids get shot in the park. Those kids need to be reconnected to their school, to prosocial things after school. They need to be reconnected to a positive culture in the family. And we need to help their family provide them with the guidance that they need. We have to do that or we have to replicate that in some kind of program. Or we lose these kids and they go to prison. They graduate from the detention center and go to prison. And to do that what we have to do is we have to focus, specifically, on keeping these kids in our community by connecting them and they graduate from high school.

This quote exemplifies not only the broken family finding and fixing girls “disconnected” relationships but also taking a broader view that prioritizes rehabilitating those contexts (e.g., families, schools) to create change in the girls. Note how the actor quoted above references the need to “help their family” to give the girl “guidance.” In other words, while these person-mediated perspectives highlight contexts as central, the implied solution or target for intervention still hinges upon changing individual girls. When actors do describe changing context, it is virtually always in girls’ proximal settings. This prevalent focus on person-centered and person-mediated attributions is a manifestation of how the system indoctrinates its actors into problematizing girls and their immediate contexts as responsible for their system pathways.

Embedded within both person-mediated and person-centered categories is an overarching theme of system actors’ paternalism in describing how girls most often engaged in risky behavior that would result in concerns for their personal safety rather than public safety. That is, actors described how girls were detained or incarcerated because they posed a safety threat to themselves (e.g., running away, self-injurious behavior, engaging in risky sexual behavior). This was described in contrast to boys who were detained or incarcerated for posing safety threats to others (e.g., gang involvement, access to firearms). Findings from the residential placement meetings revealed that girls were commonly held in the juvenile detention center or received long-term out-of-home placements for their own safety rather than concerns for community safety. This finding aligns with previous research that has consistently documented paternalism in the juvenile court aimed to “protect” girls (e.g., Gaarder et al., 2004).

ECOLOGICAL ATTRIBUTIONS

Ecological attributions were the least prevalent in our theoretically deduced a priori codes with only 41.0% of actors using at least one ecological attribution. Ecological attributions manifested in two subthemes comprising of larger sociostructures and institutional responses to delinquency. In the sociostructural subtheme, system actors (a) referenced larger sociocultural structures (e.g., patriarchy and gender norms) that brought girls into contact with the juvenile legal system, and (b) economic structures that ensured that certain parts of the population are set up to continue revolving through the system. For example, one actor noted the following about the sociostructure of poverty and its intersection with the juvenile legal system:

I think that your socioeconomic status, you know, there are differences with that too. I know there are kids in [name of affluent city] that are committing crimes, but we don’t see them . . . I think we’ve had a couple kids that have, like, spent the night in detention, but then they were out . . . and they were some pretty serious crimes. And then they were just out . . . So they either have better lawyers or they have more high-profile lawyers or they have more resources. So I think that certainly poverty is an issue. And I think people who have less resources are going to be in a revolving-door system with the court.

In the second subtheme emergent under ecological attributions, actors articulated the responses of the legal system (e.g., “she has been failed by the system since they day she was born”) to characterize girls’ involvement. The implication of using this institutional attribution suggests that there is potential for intervention at the institutional level in shifting how the system responds to girls. However, even for actors who articulated ecological attributions, the intervention options that they articulated and that were available to girls are still limiting, and even potentially dangerous for girls as the juvenile legal system operates to/is set up to fix the behavior of girls rather than addressing context.

The limited use of ecological frames is problematic especially in the context of robust evidence that underscores legal-system involvement represents a culmination of sociostructural oppressions. It is notable that the limited use of ecological perspectives is rooted in a system that is built around delivering the competing mandates of social welfare and social control but through a focus on individuals and their proximal contexts: In other words, as a menu of options for change, the system itself is structured in such a way that either girls or their proximal contexts are the only imaginable sites of intervention (Nanda, 2011). We contend that the infrequent articulation of ecological frameworks is an important manifestation of how the system functions to maintain an inequitable, paternalistic status quo. Anchored and invested in the idea of “rehabilitating” youth, the system is itself a context that is structured to produce thinking and consent from its actors that the only reasonable response to delinquency is through fixing “damaged” girls and/or their broken proximal contexts.

In addition to the attributions articulated within one-on-one interviews, during multiple observations, court actors discussed how a paternalistic perspective manifests in the court’s response when considering keeping girls “safe” from potential victimization by placing them in detention and/or residential facilities:

Manager 1: I don’t disagree with the placement, I just think it’s interesting how the system plays out that she is placed as a delinquent, but she’s a victim. If she’s not placed, she would be in danger.

Manager 2: We do place people for their own safety.

DCA: girls in particular.

Psychologist: But we take a paternalistic view because they are girls and we need to be conscious of that.

While a proportion of the actors referenced an ecological perspective, these were the least frequently used lens to conceptualize girls’ system involvement, especially in contrast to their reliance on person-centered and person-mediated explanations. Indeed, one strength of the current study is that problem definitions were analyzed and coded with explicit attention to what kinds of solutions—or responses to girls’ behavior—they implied. Our findings suggest a paucity in framing girls’ delinquency using an ecological perspective. This is limiting for actor and court intervention given that this social problem definition results in problem solutions that fail to improve girls’ contexts or address structural inequity. This is particularly important given that failure to attend to gender as a sociostructural variable that imbues differential opportunities and invokes different access to power is ultimately detrimental for girls’ outcomes.

This detriment to girls has manifested in two clear ways in the literature. First, there are not enough programs for girls, and existing programs do not appear to work as well for girls (Zahn et al., 2009). This is troubling as feminist pathways-informed research documents that girls have unique risk factors that require intervention approaches that target girls’ contexts including physical and sexual abuse, repeated status offending, self-injury, older romantic partners, family violence, and dysfunctional relationships both within and outside of the home (Chesney-Lind et al., 2008; Javdani, 2013). Despite the proliferation of literature on girls’ pathways, the findings from this study suggest that the vast majority of actors do attend to gendered risk factors and gendered processes but largely focus on individual-level attributes (e.g., mental health; person-centered) and proximal contexts (e.g., dysfunctional families; person-mediated) in conceptualizing girls’ delinquency rather than structural influences that highlight how delinquency is defined and responded to (e.g., ecological).

This paucity of actors’ ecological framing of girls’ behavior contrasts with the patterns noted among researchers documenting that increases of system-involved girls are due to changes in juvenile justice policies and arrest practices rather than changes in the behavior of girls (Javdani et al., 2011; Zahn et al., 2009). For example, research on the effects of pro-arrest policies for domestic violence incidents has increased the number of girls charged with violent offenses. Given that girls, more generally, are likely to be arrested than parents when fighting, the implementation of pro-arrest policies have had iatrogenic and net-widening influences on the increase in arrests of girls as a paternalistic court response (Strom et al., 2014).

DISCUSSION

The main empirical contribution of this study is the direct examination of individual court actors’ attributions and the interrogation of whether and how these shape discretionary decision-making that reify the court’s paternalistic response to girls. The data presented in this study provide empirical evidence that paternalism in the juvenile justice system is a contemporary challenge and not a historical feature of the system; that one manifestation of paternalism is in the attributions that legal actors make about girls’ problems and how to solve them; and there is evidence for the three distinct dimensions’ perspectives on how juvenile court actors define girls’ delinquency: person-centered, person-mediated, and ecological perspectives. While all three perspectives were present in actor narratives, actors primarily relied on person-centered and, more frequently, person-mediated perspectives. These findings evidence an overly narrow view on the location of problem behavior (e.g., girls’ thoughts, feelings, behaviors) that ultimately results in blaming individual girls (e.g., for their victimization) rather than addressing the sociostructural challenges in their lives.

The importance of this study rests in its direct empirical examination of the contemporary manifestations of paternalism in the juvenile justice system. This expands existing literature in criminology by investigating specific ways in which paternalism in the system is instantiated and can be gleaned from the attributional frameworks of legal actors. While previous work has found that legal stakeholders view delinquent girls as possessing negative character traits (gaarder et al., 2004), and typically make nonstructural attributions about girls’ external contexts (e.g., bad parenting; Burson et al., 2019), this study extends current work by examining whether, to what degree, and in what ways legal system stakeholders espouse ecological problem definitions around girls’ delinquency. This moves the discourse beyond internal versus external attributions and invokes the social function of stakeholders’ perceptions by highlighting their imagined solutions to girls’ problems. Precisely because system actors represent and cultivate the institutional climate of the legal system spaces they occupy (e.g., probation, court), how stakeholders think about girls will dictate (in part) what happens to girls in their care. This is especially important to girls, given evidence that girls are likely to be processed at earlier points in the system where subjectivity and discretion abound (Javdani, 2019), and understanding targets of change for stakeholder attributions is critical.

This research builds upon literature on paternalism in the juvenile legal system’s response to girls. Paternalism practices have been documented in feminist criminological research regarding system responses and actor descriptions of girls’ delinquency (Gaarder et al., 2004). Recent evidence suggests that there is some variability in actor attributions of girls’ offending, but underscores an overall paternalistic pattern (Burson et al., 2019; Mallicoat, 2007). However, there has been less discussion about the implications for these attributions of blames and paternalistic perspectives in terms of how actors narrate mechanisms for change, and even less locating these responses through a lens that recognizes race. Moreover, this study found that court actors emphasized the system’s responsibility in protecting girls from themselves (e.g., girls posed a greater safety risk to themselves than to their community) and defined girls’ sexuality and sexual behavior as risks.

One strength of the current study is that problem definitions were analyzed and coded with explicit attention to what kinds of solutions—or responses to girls’ behavior—they implied. Our findings suggest a paucity in framing girls’ delinquency using an ecological perspective. This is limiting for actor and court intervention given that this social problem definition results in problem solutions that fail to improve girls’ contexts or address structural inequity. A second strength of the study lies in troubling the assumption that girls’ increased delinquency is a product of their increasing threat to public safety. It is clear the juvenile court system, when considering out-of-home placements, does not only take into consideration community risk of violence, but with young women, considers risk to themselves as more important. The paternalistic need to “help” young women can lead to more severe treatment, especially for girls of color. Critically, these are perspectives articulated about a population of girls, 65% of whom are girls of color being served by a court system where the actors are 80% White. This context is important because it highlights how actors continue to pathologize girls, aligned with a system that has historically functioned as a means of controlling and sanctioning the sexuality of girls of color (Schaffner, 2006). Our results show some of the ways in which actors may reinforce racialized gender stereotypes, reifying gender-based stereotype that girls are more vulnerable and in need of protection (Puzzanchera & Ehrmann, 2018). Thus, practitioners should consider how best to advocate for racialized gender-based reform in the system including the use of gender-responsive programming and empowering young women of color and LGBTQ+ youth (Irvine-Baker et al., 2019). Paternalistic responses have the potential to keep girls on probation or incarcerate them for their own protection, inadvertently leading to girls’ longer and deeper involvement with the court. Understanding these perspectives and responses is critical to disrupting gendered pathways into the system.

The primary theoretical contributions of the study lie in our innovative integration of attributions theory with social problem definition and ecological theory to understand actor perspectives beyond how they attribute blame for girls’ delinquency. Specifically, we advance an integrative framework that captures complex information that actors use to make critical legal decisions about girls’ lives (i.e., person-centered, person-mediated, ecological). In fact, our finding that person-mediated perspectives are highly espoused by court actors is much more than a descriptive result; it suggests that actors use an approach that allows them to seemingly redirect blame from girls, who they see as victims, toward girls’ proximal contexts (especially their families) and away from the system, its resources, and how it organizes its resources.

Furthermore, this study is theoretically informed by and positioned to extend feminist criminological theories that have long understood girls’ delinquency in the context of patriarchy (Gaarder et al., 2004; Schaffner, 2006). Specifically, these theories characterize and critique the juvenile court response as problematic, paternalistic, and lacking attention to girls’ unique and gender-salient pathways. However, the ways in which broad structural processes that instantiate paternalism and patriarchy operate are much more elusive and complex. This study brings a qualitative assessment of how girls’ subjugation occurs by examining how court actors view girls’ behaviors and the causes of, blame for, and solutions to girls’ delinquency. Unpacking these processes expands not only our understanding of systems change possibilities, but also the power of systems themselves and, how and why those systems maintain their status quo through the actors they employ and empower.

CONSIDERATIONS FOR POLICY, PRACTICE, AND FUTURE RESEARCH

One clear practice direction implicated by this study’s findings centers on shifting actor’s perceptions and challenging assumptions about how girls’ contexts influence their pathways to delinquency. There is some evidence that such actor-level interventions can create a better intervention response for youth (McIntosh et al., 2014), so long as actor trainings are accompanied by clear accountability practices requiring actors to systematically document decisions (e.g., exhausting diversion options). That said, attitudes are notoriously difficult to change, so it will be critical to devise, implement, and evaluate trainings for system actors to support them. There is some evidence to suggest that attributions are learned and can be unlearned, especially attributions around individual blame (Delavega et al., 2017). Our findings suggest that training should take up person-mediated attributions whereby contexts are invoked but only insofar as they have damaged girls. This could incorporate system navigation as part of legal stakeholders’ responsibility to young people. Although rare, evidence exists to suggest that individual adults can partner with young people to support creating structural changes in their lives—suggesting that the target of change does not need to remain at the individual level just because the modality of communication is between an individual adult and an individual youth (Granski et al., 2020; Javdani, 2021). One promising avenue for system actors to support youth is in their coaching of how to navigate the complex legal system. Youth often report not knowing what their legal system mandates are, let alone how to comply with them; or not knowing how to ask for changes to mandate when they are logistically impossible to complete (NeMoyer et al., 2014).

Another clear implication of this study is to support the legal system workforce, especially frontline staff, to improve the system response to girls. This involves understanding and revising the accountability structure of the legal system workforce by shifting the culture of the job to one of partnership and care instead of surveillance and compliance. We recognize this is a tall order, but evidence on institutional change suggests that small changes like requiring documentation of “youth strengths” each month from stakeholders instead of “violations” each week can shift the climate to one where strengths assessment is legitimized and valued (Allen et al., 2012). This also requires paying attention to the structural facets of system actor jobs that make them untenable and reduce effectiveness in interacting with youth. This requires an investment in the legal system workforce to reduce burnout, increase pay, and attend to stakeholder mental health challenges that may emerge as a result of their work.

Finally, ensuring that adequate gender-responsive programs are developed, evaluated, and made accessible across jurisdictions should be a policy priority. This can support a pathway whereby girls are offered programming that is responsive to their needs as part of the systematized practices of the juvenile courts. This also relies less on legal actors to make decision about girls’ complex needs when their training and expertise do not lend itself to determining effective courses for intervention and prevention (Zahn et al., 2009). These efforts should advance and support local, state, and national policy to divert girls from carceral settings, inclusive of nonsecure detention and placement, restrictive congregate care, and residential treatment facilities not employing gender-responsive models of care. Recent policy shifts (e.g., housing youth for status offenses, residential treatment as a disposition) have created more confinement possibilities with limited evidence that girls fare any better (Sonderman et al., 2022). Our data demonstrate that the contemporary juvenile legal system responds to girls in problematic ways and, hence, diverting girls from the most restrictive spaces is critical.

LIMITATIONS AND FUTURE DIRECTIONS

Despite the novelty of the current study, there are a few limitations that are important to highlight. These data came from only one county court system. Another limitation to the current study is the extent to which these findings are both gendered and racialized. Importantly, actors did not imply race as a social structure in their articulations despite approximately two thirds of the girls in this system are girls of color. This is a critical direction for future research. For example, Moore and Padavic (2010) found that White girls were more often stereotyped by law enforcement as nonthreatening and needing protection whereas Black girls were stereotyped as aggressive and crime-prone and received harsher dispositions than White and Hispanic girls. While we have data on aggregate patterns (e.g., a disproportionate number of girls of color in contact with the county), we do not have data that examine court actor perspectives in an intersectional manner. Our results focus on girls as an understudied group, although damaging attributions certainly exist for boys and especially boys of color. We hope to build on this study in future research by examining the social problem definition framework as it applies to boys and, particularly, for boys of color. Such research may outline important structural features of attributions and social problem definitions that could be targets for future training. Future research should also examine how these attributions are negotiated by actors based on their gender, race/ethnicity, socioeconomic background, and/or roles within the juvenile legal system.

CONCLUSION

The empirical research and practice-related tools widely used by juvenile courts across the country adhere to defining and address the social problem of female juvenile delinquency at a level that reinforces girls’ culpability—even when acknowledging girls’ extensive histories of trauma, broken families, and relationships. This pattern was clearly delineated in our findings suggesting the frequency and breadth of use of person-mediated social problem definitions by court actors. Paternalism remains a persistent feature in how juvenile legal system actors locate, define, and respond to girls through varying gendered attributions. Through these observations and narratives, the promise of protection has manifested in a paternalistic court response to girls. Indeed, legal actors are best positioned to levy a legal response (Visher, 1983), therefore policy shifts that result in greater access to quality programming and off-ramps away from incarceration for girls are necessary to offset the typical solutions—to change girls in the absence of changing their contexts—invoked by juvenile legal system actors in this study.

Biographies

Valerie R. Anderson, PhD, is an associate professor in the Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice at the University of Missouri–St. Louis. The primary aim of her research program involves examining juvenile corrections and victimization—and the circumstances and contexts in which these areas intersect. She has published more than 50 articles and chapters that are featured in a wide variety of criminal justice, psychology, and public health journals.

Shabnam Javdani, PhD, is an associate professor of applied psychology at New York University. The overarching goal of her scholarship is to understand and reduce the development of inequality-related mental health and legal problems and study community and institutional responses to these complex challenges. She has published more than 75 empirical papers and book chapters and is the recipient of the NYU Carras Award for Research and the Martin Luther king Jr. Faculty Award. Her work is supported by funding from the National Institutes of Health, the National Institute of Justice, and the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention.

Sukhmani Singh, PhD, is an assistant professor in the School of Social Work at the University of Connecticut. Her research focuses on advancing epistemological understandings around a commitment to producing scholarships centered in decoloniality and intersectionality frameworks, while maintaining a focus on identifying critical individual-level and system-level levers of producing systems’ change.