Washington D.C., June 13, 2025 — Yesterday, the Center on Gender Justice & Opportunity at Georgetown Law, in partnership with the National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges (NCJFCJ), hosted a timely and critical virtual event focusing on adultification bias—the perception that Black girls are more adult-like and less innocent than their white peers—and
Black women and girls experience discrimination, microaggressions and stereotypes every day. Living with daily racism has a profound impact on the mental health, well-being and lives of all those coping with it. This special program explores the unique mental health burdens of Black women and girls in the United States and features an excerpt of
Millions of adolescent youths shoulder significant household and caregiving responsibilities, especially during the pandemic. Experts estimate that the number of young people in caretaking roles at home has increased from 1.4 million in 2005 to over 3.4 million today. This work is unpaid, unrecognized, and understudied; and it is disproportionately carried out by girls, particularly
Now a junior, Green said she wrote “Reclaiming Girlhood” to draw attention to the “adultification” of Black girls — the treatment of young girls as if they are older. The piece was inspired by a report from Georgetown Law Center on Poverty and Inequality, “Girlhood Interrupted: The Erasure of Black Girls’ Childhood,” and from her
Black girls are viewed by educators as more suspicious, mature, provocative and aggressive than their white peers, said Rebecca Epstein, the executive director of the Georgetown Law Center on Poverty and Inequality and an author of the first robust study of “adultification bias” against Black girls. The study found that Black girls as young as 5
Jamilia Blake, Ph.D., a psychologist and associate professor at Texas A&M University who co-authored the 2019 report “Listening to Black Women and Girls: Lived Experiences of Adultification Bias” and its precursor, the 2017 study “Girlhood Interrupted: The Erasure of Black Girls’ Childhood,” said adultification impacts black girls early in life. Read the Full Article at
In a 2017 research article from the Center on Poverty and Inequality at Georgetown Law, “Girlhood Interrupted: The Erasure of Black Girls Childhood,” authors Rebecca Epstein, Jamilia J. Blake and Thalia Gonzalez wrote that often times black girls are seen as being older, louder and more difficult…I can speak from personal experience. I was always