To understand why victims of childhood trauma pose a higher risk of being placed in detention, researchers point to a phenomenon commonly referred to as the sexual abuse-to-prison pipeline.

Girls go behind bars for status offenses like skipping school, drinking alcohol and violating curfew. Studies say these actions are often driven by adverse childhood experiences, including sexual abuse, neglect, family dysfunction and mental illness, leaving many girls –– disproportionately girls of color –– susceptible to arrest and imprisonment.

“Sexual abuse is a primary predictor of criminalization in girls,” said Yasmin Vafa, the executive director of Rights4Girls in Washington, D.C., a nonprofit that advocates for the rights of at-risk youth, particularly girls and gender-expansive youth.

In 2015, 81% of girls in South Carolina’s youth detentions said they’d experienced severe and repeated sexual abuse, according to “The Girls’ Story,” a report by Rights4Girls and The Georgetown Law Center on Poverty and Inequality.

In the 26 years since the founding of the Young Women’s Freedom Center, executive director Jessica Nowlan said that of the 38,000 young people the center worked with, the overwhelming majority have suffered physical and sexual violence. 

The San Francisco nonprofit provides jobs, education, healing and a voice for system-impacted youth, even visiting facilities to assist kids prior to their release.   

“We are talking about young people who have very little power in terms of our society,” Nowlan said. “These are young people that have been pushed to the margins.”

Now 41, Nowlan spent much of her childhood at the mercy of systems she now works to reform. Addiction and abuse were among the adverse experiences Nowlan often witnessed in her childhood home, though she said the child welfare system was riddled with trauma of its own.    

By age 13, Nowlan was homeless in the Tenderloin of San Francisco.  

Shoplifting and parole violations fueled the 17 incarcerations in Nowlan’s past before she found the Young Women’s Freedom Center. Through the center’s work and healing programs, Nowlan broke away from the systemic cycle. 

A sense of belonging, a safe place to go or a person to confide in can be pivotal factors in a child’s life, forces that are strong enough to even deter them away from the sexual-abuse-to-prison pipeline, Nolan said.  

“The pipeline part, it’s complicated. It’s not just ‘You get sexually assaulted at 16, you’re going to go to prison,’” said Danielle Arlanda Harris, a professor at the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Griffith University in Australia. “It’s being exposed to situations that make the likelihood of prison more possible.” 

Harris said the wide net cast by the sexual-abuse-to-prison pipeline over multiple vulnerable populations is what makes the phenomenon’s classification as a “pipeline” somewhat problematic. 

Difficult to recognize, escape or heal from, Harris said the pipeline is better represented as a colander. While not all youth impacted by sexual abuse will end up incarcerated, the chance at-risk kids receive the help they need to before passing through the strainer and falling into the system is unlikely, she said. 

The psychological impact of repeated sexual trauma during pivotal developmental years is what makes the abuse to prison pipeline sometimes hard to recognize and can occur in tandem with other adverse childhood experiences. 

Francine Sherman, a clinical professor of law at Boston College Law School and co-author of study “Gender Injustice,” said girls with histories of abuse are often dually-involved with the welfare and juvenile justice systems.

According to the 2015 report, 47% of girls involved with child-welfare were referred to court for status offense charges.

 “It’s a whole lot less about the girl’s initial behavior, than it is a colossal failure of our response,” Sherman said.  

Sherman noted that systems like welfare and education are in place to provide solutions for at-risk youth, but often fail to address the root of their trauma and behavior. This lack of understanding can push children further down the path of arrest or incarceration.

“Girls’ trauma is different. Girls’ responses are different,” said Rebecca Epstein, executive director of the Georgetown Law Center on Poverty and Inequality, an advocacy group that addresses disparities of race and class nationwide. 

Advocates like Epstein push for a more gender-responsive justice reform that addresses the needs and driving risk factors for girls who’ve been led into the system, especially policy that supports low-income girls and girls of color.

“It’s important to recognize the dual effects of girls, race and gender in examining how she’s perceived and treated and responded to in our public systems,” Epstein said.

While the driving forces behind the sexual abuse to prison pipeline tends to target girls, gender expansive, transgender and gender-nonconforming youth, experts and advocates notice and acknowledge that race heightens these risks even further.

“White girls and girls of color share certain challenges, but they’re also very unique. Girls of color and low-income girls are the voices that are most consistently absent from the conversation,” Epstein said.

Minority girls are at an increasingly high risk of sex trafficking and arrest, due to racial disparities in socioeconomic status. Even more, black youth overrepresented in the justice system, accounting for 53% percent of all prostitution arrests, according to a 2017 data report by The U.S. Department of Justice. 

“Incarceration and detention [are] never appropriate for children, particularly girls, because of their unique pathways into the system, because an overwhelming majority of girls behind bars are survivors of sexual abuse,” Vafa said.

Often the needs of incarcerated victims of rape and abuse go untreated and ignored while in detention, leaving kids at a heightened risk of revictimization. 

Girls tend to lash out in response to retriggering events while incarcerated, pushed further into the justice system through a process that Vafa refers to as “bootstrapping.”

“It is retraumatizing to incarcerate them,” Vafa said. “Things like being forced to strip and cavity searches…constantly having your movements controlled by others…being subjected to really harmful techniques like isolation and solitary confinement.”

Girls disproportionately represent 76% of all “prostitution” charges, despite being younger than the legal age of consent, according to a 2015 report by the U.S. Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention.

Survivor advocate Withelma “T” Ortiz Pettigrew said harmful conditions inside of many juvenile detentions often mirror the environment that sex traffickers subject their victims to.

“Many times when they’re put in a detention facility, it’s almost like a dog in a kennel,” Pettigrew said.  

Pettigrew, along with Rights4Girls, launched the “No Such Thing as a Child Prostitute” campaign in 2016 that successfully eradicated the terminology “child prostitute” in the media. For youth justice advocates and survivors, the change is big step towards understanding young victims of sex trafficking.

“It changed the idea that these are willing participants, it changed the idea that they were complicit in and in agreement,” Pettigrew said. “It allowed people to understand that this is something that’s happening to them, not something that they’re willingly participating in.”

In doing this, Vafa said these systems would have to acknowledge and address the intersectionality of girls who are impacted by the sexual-abuse-to-prison pipeline. 

“It’s really a matter of getting systems to understand the connection between childhood trauma, abuse and incarceration,” Vafa said.

The post What fuels the sexual-abuse-to-prison pipeline? appeared first on Kids Imprisoned.

Iziah Reedy was waiting for a court date for possessing a gun and a stolen car — instead he got a phone call inviting him to a half-day workshop that would have him meet inspiring mentors and see his charges dropped. 

“This is impossible,” Reedy said he remembers thinking at the time. “I thought I was definitely getting set up.” 

Reedy,16 at the time of the 2016 incident, had been pulled over by a cop in front of his little sister’s school in the perpetually cloudy Seattle-suburb, Federal Way, Washington. She was sick, so he went to deliver her soup in a stolen vehicle. 

When he saw the cop approaching his driver’s side window, Reedy said he thought his fate was sealed, the trajectory of his life determined. 

“I already saw my life going down the drain,” he said. “[It was] gonna pertain to me being out in the streets, even if it involved me being in and out of jail.”

Iziah’s phone call came from Choose 180, a Seattle-area organization committed to creating better futures for kids who come in contact with the juvenile justice system. 

The organization was launched in 2011 with the King County prosecuting attorney, with an explicit goal to address racial disparities in the juvenile justice system. Its workshop program takes the place of formal charges being filed, sparing kids the consequences of a blemished criminal record. In 2019, the program diverted nearly 400 young people away from the formal justice system. 

According to Goode, of the kids they serve, 68% are “Black or brown.” According to government data, King County — renamed in the ‘80s to honor Martin Luther King Jr. — is just 15% Black and Hispanic. 

“We’re working with young people who are coming to a program that is centered in their experience, not centered in white dominant culture,” he said.  

Young people up to the age of 24 who commit misdemeanors, outside of sexual and domestic offenses, can go to a half-day Choose 180 workshop and settle their case before the court gets involved. Choose 180 is an offramp on the road to juvenile incarceration that allows kids to bypass most of the traditional justice system — one which Choose 180’s executive director Sean Goode feels is too focused on kids’ past, not their potential. 

“The premise [judges and prosecutors] operate out of is that accountability needs to be to what somebody’s done,” Goode said. “And not to what somebody can be.”

Today, at 20 years old, Iziah is a barber with his own clients. Sometimes he cuts Goode’s hair. 

For Goode, his program is not just an offramp, but a launching pad, providing opportunities for a better, more fulfilling future. 

“We don’t create solutions for young people, we create possibilities with young people,” Goode said. 

Adam Fine, a professor in Arizona State University’s School of Criminology and Criminal Justice, is one of many researchers analyzing data collected from the Crossroads study — an ongoing operation launched in 2011 that seeks to understand the effects of various consequences kids receive after becoming involved in the juvenile justice system. 

They looked at three groups of kids who had engaged in similar illegal behavior. One had no interaction with the justice system — their crimes went undetected or otherwise ignored. Another group had their cases handled “informally”, i.e. lenient probation or diversion programs like Choose 180. And the final group received the most severe consequences, like incarceration in a detention facility or an ankle monitor and strict probation requirements. 

Fine and his colleagues found that after 6 months, the “no-contact” group’s illegal behavior remained unchanged, while the lenient group’s decreased — and the strict group’s increased.  

University of Washington psychologist Sarah Walker recently published a study that echoed Fine’s findings: holding kids in detention prior to their trial made them significantly more likely to reoffend in the future. The reason for this, she and others hypothesize, is because in detention, kids meet and befriend others involved in criminal activity. 

“It reinforces an identity for the youth that they’re a bad kid,” she said. 

Choose 180 aims to do the opposite. According to their 2019 Annual Report, 87% of their workshop participants do not reoffend.

Goode said he thinks of Choose 180 as an emergency room. 

“We’re triaging [young people], helping them get well enough and then referring them out to primary care and specialty practitioners to help them sustain their commitment to change,” he said. 

The diagnoses are unique to the kids’ individual needs. Choose180 helps kids with mental health problems set appointments with behavioral specialists and others get jobs at local businesses. Goode remembers one young person who was committing crimes to make money to help his parents pay for his brother’s baseball league. Choose180 helped pay the bill.

Goode’s parents suffered from mental health problems and his brother went to juvenile prison for murder. Most of the staff at Choose 180 has, like Goode, overcome extraordinary hardships. 

This, he said, gives them “the ability to connect on a real level and say, ‘I get it.’ Not just I get it because you said it but I get it because I lived it.”

The program has received national attention for its success and Goode said he spends a lot of time traveling and talking about their approach. Currently, he and his colleagues are in communication with advocates in Utah looking to implement a similar program. 

When Iziah Reedy attended the Choose 180 workshop, he said he heard from people who had “way harder life experiences” than he had, and “overcame [them] and they’re doing great today,” which humbled and inspired him. He said he no longer felt his life must be “going down the drain.” 

After Reedy was caught with a gun in the stolen vehicle, he was expelled. Choose 180 helped him get back in school, graduate, and even helped pay for his tuition for barber school. He’s since served on a government council for juvenile justice, participated in a program for young leaders in his community, and spoken to other kids in his similar situation — inspiring some, he said, to pursue cutting hair like he did. 

Before Choose 180, Reedy said the streets were  all he knew. They simply showed him he could use the ingenuity and motivation he learned there to succeed in business. 

“Cutting hair was similar to me being in the streets,” he said. “It was just more professional and it was more legal.”

Reedy’s road to personal reform has been windy, though. He said at one point after high school, things got slow at the barber shop and he temporarily turned back to a mainstay of his former life-on-the-streets behavior: shoplifting for extra cash.

While on a vacation with friends in Phoenix, he was arrested in a shopping mall for stealing shoes. He said he spent a couple days in jail and the ensuing months flying back and forth from Seattle to Phoenix to attend to the case, which was constantly complicated by shifting prosecutors and plea deals. 

He said he felt he was “getting juggled around like a toy” by the justice system and realized that its problems lay deeper than just law enforcement. In King County, he was sent to a seminar after getting caught with a gun, in Phoenix, he was sent to jail for getting caught with stolen sneakers. 

“We shouldn’t have to spin the wheel” he said, comparing the court system to a gambling game. Despite his frustrations, he said he’s back on track, reinvigorated by a new addition to his family. 

Earlier this year, Reedy became a father when his girlfriend had a baby girl, Anuhea, a Hawaiian name they gave in tribute to his mother’s family. Reedy’s father wasn’t around when he was a kid. Now, he said his number one goal in life is to be a great dad. 

Beyond that, his priorities are simple: “enjoying life and owning my own business.”

This is the kind of future the staff at Choose 180 sees in the young people they seek to help — even when they don’t see it themselves. 

“We’re not fixated on behavior change,” Goode said. “We’re fixated on helping young people heal and become more of who they are.” 

Source photo courtesy of Iziah Reedy

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