“Juvenile justice is a gender-specific system, one that reflects and operates on assumptions about gender and reflects masculine [and feminine] norms.” —Law professor Nancy Dowd
As Nancy Dowd notes, juvenile justice systems tend to be highly gendered and gendering environments, ones that anticipate, reward and even punish specific sorts of masculinity in boys and femininity in girls.
However, because it simply assumes that boys will be manly and girls feminine juvenile justice systems are largely unaware of their own gender assumptions and thus unable to question or change them. Perhaps the main area where juvenile justice does explicitly address gender norms is programming for LGBTQ+ youth (which addresses issues of gender nonconformity).
This is not to say that most girls won’t want to be feminine and boys masculine; of course they will. It’s about what kinds of manhood and womanhood we want them learning.
For instance, being manly can mean learning to keep a stiff upper lip, protect the weak and put women and children first. It can also mean getting lots of girls pregnant and beating up queers.
Both of these are definitions of masculinity that circulate in different subcultures in different places. But most of us would see one as more constructive and we certainly prefer our sons internalize that one and not the other.
Yet studies suggest that the beliefs young people hold about gender can have enormous impact on them at nearly every level of juvenile justice systems — mental health, trauma care, education, probation, personal relationships and rehabilitation and reentry — and are deeply connected to inequities caused by race and class.
Gender norms can be particularly important during what some experts term the “gender intensification” years of ages 9 to 14, when interest in traditional gender norms accelerates and belief in them solidifies. It is no coincidence that these are also the years when many young people first start having more frequent engagement with law enforcement and child welfare systems.
Traditional gender norms hurt both genders
Boys who buy into narrow ideals of manhood as defined by qualities like strength, aggression, dominance and emotional toughness are more likely to be expelled from school, underachieve economically or have depressed labor force participation, to suffer depression, to have problems dealing with trauma and to engage in male-on-male, anti-gay and intimate partner violence.
They are more likely to prioritize behaviors like public risk-taking, confrontation, defying adult authorities and suffering punishment silently which — taken together — are practically a checklist for increased friction with school disciplinary and law enforcement systems.
Such boys are also more likely to rigidly police masculinity among their peers. If they have been traumatized, they are likely to avoid care-seeking because they believe showing feelings or emotional vulnerability is unmanly, weak or feminine. For the same reason, they are also more likely to avoid seeing a health care professional when they are sick, even if care is freely available.
Constantly maintaining a tough, dominant manhood is hard work and such boys are also more likely to develop depression and suicidal ideation, particularly if they have been traumatized. As one frustrated therapist explained to me: If they won’t talk to me about it, I can’t help them heal.
Riki Wilchins
Similarly, girls who buy into the “three Ds” of traditional femininity — being Deferential, Dependent and Desirable — are more likely to have unplanned pregnancies, defer to male sexual prerogatives, have low self-esteem, equate self-worth with physical beauty and grow up dependent on older, stronger male partners who can take care of them economically and psychologically. (Factors that also put some girls at enhanced risk of being trafficked.)
Both boys and girls who buy into harmful gender norms may have a more difficult time in rehabilitation and reintegrating as returning citizens. This can be especially important for dual status youth, both in foster care and those aging out of systems, who may have received minimal guidance for responsible adult role models and picked up most of their ideals about manhood or womanhood from peers or media..
These might be considered “bottom up” impacts on individuals passing through systems. But these norms also affect those tasked with their welfare.
Professionals interacting with young people — probation, detention and field officers, court advocates, educators, judges, therapists — are constantly modeling masculinity and femininity, providing important messages for how to be a man or a woman. Men may be modeling attitudes of competitiveness, stoicism, sexism and even tacit homophobia that disparages weakness (“Man up,” “boys don’t cry,” etc. Yet few have received any training in this.
Youth of color singled out
Professionals may also have implicit biases: stereotypic attitudes we all hold about other groups but aren’t fully aware of and are often connected with their race, class, ethnicity or gender.
For example, studies consistently find that, when compared with middle-class white boys, low-income boys of color are more likely to be viewed as threatening or predatory, to be punished more harshly and to have their probation revoked for the same or similar infractions — even though probation officers believe they are being evenhanded.
Similarly in schools — often an entry point into juvenile justice systems (i.e., the school-to-prison pipeline) — low-income boys of color are more likely to be seen by educators and safety officers as “future felons,” to be suspended for highly subjective “attitude offenses” and to be expelled. In addition, studies show they are perceived by adults as 4½ years older than they actually are.
Studies have documented similar bias against low-income girls of color. For instance, girls are much more likely to be referred to court for minor “status offences” (truancy, running away, curfew violations) more often overlooked among males as boys will be boys.
As the Coalition for Juvenile Justice notes, girls comprise 16% of detained youth but 40% of those detained for status offenses — a figure that rises to 70% in some states. What makes this discrepancy more remarkable is that many status offenses like running away or staying out late are responses to home sexual abuse, effectively criminalizing girls’ attempts to protect themselves.
Similarly, once they are paroled, girls of color are more likely to have it revoked for the same kinds of minor infractions that led to their incarceration, like truancy or curfew.
In part, this seems due to implicit gendered biases and adults wanting a more obedient. submissive femininity from girls. So schools and parents push them into juvenile justice systems in an effort to get them to conform (i.e., the abuse-to-prison pipeline).
Girls tend to have different paths into juvenile justice, different experiences there and different paths and are often revictimized once in child welfare systems (i.e., polyvictimization).
Yet there is little in the way of girl-specific programs for them. Ninety percent of juvenile justice programs were developed for and normed on boys (and even some of those that are gender-responsive were developed with white girls).
One large Eastern institution we surveyed offered only a single girls program, which taught a combination of avoiding pregnancy and feminine etiquette — a legacy program that encapsulated conflicting juvenile justice attitudes toward girls: simultaneously wanting to protect them but also needing them to display traditional, docile femininity while criminalizing the very kinds of defiant, assertive behavior they may need to survive abusive circumstances — all without ever making a connection among the three.
Making that connection might require thinking beyond race and incorporating factors like class and of course gender. This is intersectionality, viewing systems of oppression as overlapping, so that racial discrimination is always gendered and gender discrimination is always raced.
This need for intersectional thinking is also integral to bringing more equity to juvenile justice workplaces themselves. For instance, raced and gendered biases can lead to hostile workplaces or to daily microaggressions against women, particularly those of color. Our complex discomfort around women having power can leave female leaders in no-win situations: perceived as cold and unfeminine if they’re strong and assertive. but as weak and unassertive if they try to be friendly and supportive.
A path forward
One way to address all these challenges might be creating model initiatives with a strong, specific focus on gender norms and then collecting pre-post data to see if they work.
I’m unaware of any child welfare systems that have done so to date, but here’s one vision of what that might look like …
For youth: regular programs (both small group and one-on-one) that help them think critically about rigid gender norms and effects on behavior, decision-making and rehabilitation (with gender-specific ones for girls).
For professionals: training on gender norms integrated into onboarding and annual professional development, combined with self-surveys to help them become more aware of their own biases.
For institutions: Equity footprint audits that assess policies, procedures and programs; regular anonymous surveys to gain insight into staff’s real perceptions of workplace environments; creating concrete equity goals, measuring progress regularly and appointing an equity officer reporting to top management responsible for them.
There’s no single answer or silver bullet that will solve everything, but these are some of the initiatives that other organizations have found helpful.
If you find this idea interesting, please feel free to reach out to me directly. We also have a summary of the findings from the gender audit we recently conducted of one of the U.S.’s 10 largest juvenile justice systems available on our website for free download. We’ll be covering these and other topics at a Tuesday webinar hosted by JDAI Connect. Email jdaiconnect@pretrial.org for help getting registered.
Riki Wilchins is executive director of TrueChild, a network of researchers and experts that improves life outcomes for at-risk youth through race- and gender-responsive approaches. The author of six books on gender theory and politics, her newest book for funders and nonprofits is titled, “Gender Norms & Intersectionality: Connecting Race, Class and Gender.”