Girls, Violence, and Delinquency

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.