Civic engagement has the potential to empower young adults, increase their self-determination, and give them the skills and self-confidence they need to enter the workforce. We need your ideas! Click here to share. Girls, Juvenile Delinquency, and Gangs. A lack of family supervision and monitoring has been shown to have a causal link to delinquency for both boys and girls, but ineffective parenting practices harsh or inconsistent discipline , family conflict, growing up in poverty, a lack of a consistent caregiver, and frequent family moves are more likely to affect the chance that girls will be involved in gangs and conduct delinquent acts.
A strong attachment or connection with school has been found to act as a protective factor for girls, while a lack of connection or engagement with school is connected with increased rates of delinquency for girls.
Resources Gender-Specific Programming This resource page from the OJJDP provides a comprehensive summary about girls and delinquency and their involvement in the juvenile justice system. Collaboration Profiles Memphis Fast Forward. National Youth Gang Survey Analysis. Uniform Crime Reports. Highlights from the Summit on Preventing Youth Violence.
Just Launched! Redesigned YE4C. September Summit on Preventing Youth Violence. Programs Gang Resistence and Education Program. Publications National Gang Threat Assessment. Changing Course: Preventing Gang Membership. Highlights of the National Youth Gang Survey. Juvenile Justice Bulletin: Gang Prevention. Predictors of Youth Violence. The Impact of Gangs on Communities. Violence by Gang Members, Resources Gender-Specific Programming.
Research and Evaluation Projects on Gangs. Risk and Protective Factors Data Tool. Websites Federal Bureau of Prisons. Gangs Security Threat Groups. The MTFC girls' average number of days spent in locked settings fell from 75 in the year prior to the initial assessment to 22 in the year following, while the GC group's average dropped from 89 days to 56 days.
During the same period, scores on a delinquency measure that combined the number of criminal referrals, days locked up, and self-reports of delinquent behaviors dropped by about half among the MTFC girls and roughly a third among the GC girls. The MTFC girls' advantages on both measures widened as behavioral improvement continued during the next year.
The researchers linked MTFC's superior outcomes to the program's greater emphasis on homework. Leve explains. An analysis of the data found that time spent studying accounted for about 8 percent of both groups' reductions of time in locked settings in the first 12 months.
The MTFC girls were given incentives to study at least 50 minutes per day in a quiet setting where adults could monitor and confirm their performance.
The number of days per week during which they spent at least 30 minutes on homework increased from an average of 2 days to 3. The GC girls, without such incentives, slightly decreased their engagement with homework over the same period. According to the researchers, completing homework was important for several reasons: It got the girls into a nightly routine of working on a task that would help them prepare for the next day, it required that they spend more of their time engaged in supervised activities at home rather than unsupervised activities outside the home, and the repeated exposure and practice made them feel more comfortable performing academic tasks.
Adolescent girls who participated in Multidimensional Treatment Foster Care MTFC , an intervention designed for young people with histories of arrest for illicit drug use and other crimes, were half as likely as their peers in standard residential treatment to get pregnant within 2 years of enrollment.
Patricia Chamberlain and Dr. Chamberlain and Leve had previously shown that the well-supervised foster care provided by MTFC reduced arrest and lockup rates and increased homework completion and school attendance among chronically delinquent to year-old girls see article page In their new study, with colleague Dr. David Kerr, the researchers randomly assigned 81 girls to MTFC and another 85 girls to group residences. At the 2-year followup, 27 percent of the MTFC girls had reported a pregnancy since enrollment, compared with 47 percent of the girls in group care.
The study was designed principally to compare the two interventions, but researchers also wanted to explore whether MTFC would produce better outcomes if it included a component that targeted risky sexual behaviors. Hence, half of the MTFC girls received counseling in how to avoid risky sexual behaviors and practice responsible dating, while the other half received no such counseling.
Both of those MTFC groups had similar pregnancy results, which "suggests that the general approach of increasing supervision and reducing delinquent peer associations might be just as effective as programs that specifically focus on preventing sexual risk taking," says Dr. Leve adds. Kerr, D. Pregnancy rates among juvenile justice girls in two randomized controlled trials of Multidimensional Treatment Foster Care.
Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology 77 3 , Chamberlain hypothesized that life lessons learned in a family setting would be more directly applicable post-treatment than lessons learned in institutional environments. Both the foster parents with whom the girls live during MTFC and the adult with whom they will live after treatment receive training in well-tested techniques to encourage and reinforce acceptable behavior.
The foster parents also receive daily support via telephone from project staff. MTFC may also confer another major advantage: cost savings.
Even though the current study did not analyze expenses, other research has shown that MTFC costs, depending on location, are one-half to two-thirds those of group care. These costs were estimated by the Washington State Institute for Public Policy and included savings to taxpayers for victim and crime costs - see, for example, www.
According to Dr. Eve Reider of NIDA's Division of Epidemiology, Services and Prevention Research, these studies address a growing need for research-based interventions that are effective for delinquent girls. Reider says. Chamberlain, P. Multidimensional Treatment Foster Care for girls in the juvenile justice system: 2-year follow-up of a randomized clinical trial. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology 75 1 , Leve, L.
A randomized evaluation of Multidimensional Treatment Foster Care: Effects on school attendance and homework completion in juvenile justice girls. Research on Social Work Practice 17 6 ,
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