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Girls, Violence, and Delinquency

Popular Myths and Persistent Problems

  • Chapter
Handbook of Youth and Justice

Part of the book series: The Plenum Series in Crime and Justice ((PSIC))

Abstract

Every year, girls account for one out of four arrests of young people in America (Federal Bureau of Investigation, 1995, p. 226). Despite this, the young women who find themselves in the juvenile justice system either by formal arrest or by referral1 are almost completely invisible. Our stereotype of the juvenile delinquent is so indisputably male that the general public, those experts whose careers in criminology have been built studying “delinquency”, and those practitioners working with delinquent youth rarely if ever consider girls and their problems.

Children, unlike adults, can be “referred” to the juvenile justice system by a variety of sources, including teachers, social workers, or even parents. As this and subsequent chapters will show, these other sources of entry are particularly significant in the case of girls’ entry into the juvenile justice system.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Women’s Studies Program, University of Hawaii at Manoa, Honolulu, Hawaii, 96822, USA

    Meda Chesney-Lind

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  1. University of New Hampshire, Durham, New Hampshire, USA

    Susan O. White

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Chesney-Lind, M. (2001). Girls, Violence, and Delinquency. In: White, S.O. (eds) Handbook of Youth and Justice. The Plenum Series in Crime and Justice. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4615-1289-9_7

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