Violence against girls provokes girls' violence: from private injury to public harm.
Young women adjudicated delinquent in juvenile court report suffering inordinate amounts of emotional, physical, and sexual trauma in early childhood and adolescence. In addition, adolescent girls' arrests for violent crimes rose dramatically in the 1990s. This article explores the relationship between those two factors. Drawing from interviews with court-involved girls, this article highlights two contexts in which girls committed aggressive offenses: an incidence of intimate violence in a lesbian relationship and a stabbing in self-defense against sexual assault. I argue that the trauma witnessed and experienced from prior childhood and adolescent injuries--much of it experienced in private--contributed to girls' coming to the attention of public authorities.
Schaffner
Laurie
L
University of Illinois at Chicago, USA.
D000223:Adaptation, Psychological; D000293:Adolescent; D000294:Adolescent Behavior / Q000523:psychology*; D000374:Aggression / Q000523:psychology; D000739:Anecdotes as Topic; D002648:Child; D002649:Child Abuse / Q000523:psychology*; D002650:Child Abuse, Sexual / Q000523:psychology; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007389:Internal-External Control; D007398:Interpersonal Relations; D007604:Juvenile Delinquency / Q000523:psychology*; D010287:Parent-Child Relations; D012931:Social Environment; D012940:Social Problems