Engendering the Agenda: Girls, Young Women and Youth Justice
| Author | Loraine Gelsthorpe,Gilly Sharpe |
| Date | 01 December 2009 |
| DOI | 10.1177/1473225409345098 |
| Published date | 01 December 2009 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
E D I T O R I A L
© The Author(s), 2009. Reprints and permissions:
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Published by SAGE Publications
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ISSN 1473–2254, Vol 9(3): 195–208
DOI: 10.1177/1473225409345098
Engendering the Agenda:
Girls, Young Women and Youth Justice
Gilly Sharpe and Loraine Gelsthorpe
Correspondence: Dr Gilly Sharpe, School of Law, University of Sheffi eld, Bartolomé
House, Winter Street, Sheffi eld, S3 7ND, UK. Email: g.h.sharpe@sheffi eld.ac.uk
The Origins of this Special Issue
The origins of this special issue of Youth Justice: An International Journal lie in recognition of the
fact that, thus far, contributors to the journal have paid very limited attention to offending by
girls and young women and responses to them from the youth justice system and allied agencies.
This neglect contrasts sharply with the intensity of the popular spotlight on girls’ lawbreaking
and their behaviour in public space, and with the increasing presence of girls and young women
within the youth justice system. Indeed, they constitute the fastest growing population within
youth justice systems internationally (Carrington, 2006). What we offer in this Introduction is
an overview of contemporary themes and concerns about girls’ lawbreaking and their criminal-
ization, as well as a guide to what follows in subsequent articles.
Throughout most, if not all, of the 20th century defi nitions of, and responses to, girls’ delin-
quent and troublesome behaviour were closely tied to ideas about ‘respectable’ femininity.
Unwritten rules demanding that female children meet exceptionally high moral standards meant
that girls’ sexual transgressions were often more harshly punished than their criminal acts (Smart,
1976; Gelsthorpe and Worrall, this volume). Girls’ sexual behaviour was often interpreted as a
sign of emotional disturbance, with its roots in family or individual pathology, and indications
that the usual familial controls were proving unsuccessful in constraining girlhood enterprise
and adventure were refl ected in legal defi nitions which included being ‘beyond parental control’
or ‘in moral danger’. Such pronouncements permitted the institutionalization of girls who
had not broken the law; in fact many girls so designated were likely to have been victims of
sexual abuse.
More recently, though, popular concerns have shifted away from sexuality and towards
violence as the central site of female youthful transgression (Chesney-Lind and Irwin, 2008;
Sharpe, 2008), a shift which is mirrored in the subject matter of the overwhelming majority
of empirical criminological studies of young women internationally (recent edited collections
include Cummings and Leschied, 2003; Alder and Worrall, 2004; and Putallaz and Bierman,
2004). A consistent theme is that respectable fears about girls have tended to centre on their
being beyond familial or self-control; indeed, the contemporary focus on girls’ violence main-
tains attention on the embodiment of their misdeeds – the female body consistently depicted as
uncontrolled or uncontrollable.
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Youth Justice 9(3)
In criminal justice policy and practice, gender-differentiated approaches to defi ning and
responding to adolescent offending – based on assumptions that boys’ and girls’ needs and
deeds are essentially different – have given way in recent years to gender-neutral, or gender-
blind, approaches, wherein girls are assessed and treated identically to boys (Worrall, 2000).
Whilst in some respects signalling an improvement on earlier discourses that pathologized girls’
delinquent behaviour, criminalized their welfare needs and established female sexuality as the
primary sphere of criminal justice governance, gender blindness has resulted in an increase in
the number of girls and women appearing in court and, ultimately, in prison (Worrall, 2002).
Patterns of Female Youth Offending and Criminalization
Changes in legislation and policy hinder the analysis of recent trends in girls’ offending and
offi cial responses to it. Furthermore, changes in the identifi cation and classifi cation of girlhood
delinquency and offending mean that a female ‘offender’ today may well have been appre-
hended for rather different behaviours from her typical counterpart in the 1970s, for example.
The dominance of sexual delinquency as the primary rationale for intervention with girls for a
large part of the 20th century creates further diffi culties in charting longer-term trends in female
juvenile offending: the focus on the moral policing of girls’ sexuality served to keep much of
girls’ lawbreaking beyond the purview of the criminal courts, as well as creating the impression
that girls’ (but not boys’) delinquency was primarily of a sexual nature (Cox, 2003; Gelsthorpe
and Worrall, this volume).
Notwithstanding the limitations of this ‘area of shifting sands’ (Maguire, 2007: 243) in
measuring the true extent of criminal behaviour, much can be learned from crime statistics
about offi cial representations of, and responses to, young female offenders. As Carol Smart has
observed, perceived changes in female delinquency tend to be ‘not so much indicative of actual
changes in the frequency and character of female delinquency but denote a new appraisal of the
situation’ (Smart, 1976: 73). The analysis of statistical crime and criminalization patterns holds
theoretical interest in relation to understanding changes and continuities in the youth justice
system; in addition, statistics and their analysis can infl uence system responses, thus having
direct material consequences for (certain) young women. For example, statistical rises in girls’
‘violence’ in recent years may well have led to changes in public and professional perceptions
of girls’ behaviour in public space, which may in turn have led to the ‘self-fulfi lling’ effect of
increased reporting and policing of girls’ fi ghting and disorderly behaviour (Steffensmeier and
Schwartz, 2009).
It is well documented that girls and women offend less than boys and men, and that those
who do offend have shorter criminal ‘careers’ (Burman, 2004; Gelsthorpe and Sharpe, 2006).
Females are responsible for only a minority of recorded offences committed by the under-18s
internationally (Chesney-Lind and Shelden, 2004; Carrington, 2006; SCRA, 2008; Ministry of
Justice, 2009). And while self-report data attenuate the gender difference in recorded offending,
the gap widens signifi cantly when more serious delinquency is considered (Lanctôt and Le
Blanc; 2002; Smith and McAra, 2004).
What is certain is that when girls do offend, the rate at which they are being processed
through the criminal justice system has increased dramatically over a very short period.
Minor youthful transgressions, which make up the majority of young females’ offences, are
being formally policed at an unprecedented rate. In England and Wales, for example, trends
Sharpe and Gelsthorpe – Girls, Young Women and Youth Justice
197
in policing, prosecution and sentencing practices have resulted in a signifi cant increase – and
particularly for girls – in the number of young people coming into contact with the youth justice
system. The overall number of offences committed by young females resulting in a disposal rose
between 2002/3 and 2005/6 by a massive 38.7 per cent, compared with a comparable 6.6 per
cent rise for young males (Youth Justice Board, 2007).
While there is little evidence that the resultant criminalization of girls has been intentioned,
in a gender-specifi c way, it does appear that misplaced attempts to further equal opportunities
through equal (that is, identical) treatment, combined with girls’ and young women’s minority
(and thus marginalized) status within the youth justice system, have led to gender being ignored
in both policy and practice, the consequences of which have served to criminalize girls and
propel them into custody. At the same time, a sharp decline in statutory care and welfare pro-
vision for children, young people and their families (Jones, 2001) has all but closed off non-
criminal justice avenues of support for young people in diffi culty in some jurisdictions. Morgan
and Newburn’s contention that the breakdown of informal social controls in many families,
neighbourhoods, schools and residential care homes may have led to an increased reliance on
the police ‘to intervene in settings that used typically to consume their own smoke’ (Morgan
and Newburn, 2007: 1044) is particularly relevant to girls, given the importance of informal,
unoffi cial, private and familial mechanisms of control in the history of female juvenile justice
(Cain, 1989; Cox, 2003).
Girls and Violence: Media Exaggeration or Feminism Gone Too Far?
Contemporary ‘moral panics’, fuelled by media reports of increasing girlhood binge drinking,
‘ladette’ culture and violence, have done much to promulgate the view that girls are getting out of
control and no longer the respectable young ladies they once were. For example, a World Health
Organisation survey indicating that 29 per cent of English and Scottish girls aged 11 to 15 had
been involved in a fi ght during the previous year earned the newspaper headline, ‘British girls
among most violent in world’ (Honigsbaum, 2006), despite the fact that boys reported more
than twice the level of violence that girls did. Batchelor (2001) and Worrall (2004)...
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