From a young age, adults hypersexualize and adultify black girls; they’re seen as more mature than their white counterparts and, because of this, adults fail to protect them. The lack of protection allows us to become an ignored demographic; this leads to a world of danger for growing black girls. Read the Full Article at
Last week, Impact Austin, the women’s giving circle that pools individual donations to make large grants to local nonprofits, announced its first grant to a collaborative project to advance equity for women and girls of color in Central Texas. The $110,000 grant will fund the “Innocence Initiative,” an effort led by Measure Austin to address
Times have changed since the 1930s, and girls’ experiences in the criminal justice system have too. Yet echoes of my grandmother’s time remain. According to the report “The Sexual Abuse to Prison Pipeline,” published by the Georgetown Law Center on Poverty and Inequality, the Ms. Foundation for Women and Rights4Girls, girls in the criminal justice
Georgetown Law’s Center on Poverty and Inequality released a study, Girlhood Interrupted: The Erasure of Black Girls’ Childhood, in 2017 about perceptions of innocence in black girls. The study found that black girls aged 5-19 are viewed by adults to need less protection, nurturing and support than white girls of the same age. It also
Black girls make up just 16% of the female student population in the country, but account for more than one-third of all school-based arrests. A 2007 report in the journal Youth and Society found that Black girls were penalized for deviating from social norms of female behavior, and in particular for being “loud, defiant, and
Teachers may misinterpret trauma-related behavior — struggles to focus in class, sleeping in class, being irritable — as being disrespectful. In addition, adults view black girls as less in need of nurture, protection, support and comfort than white girls of the same age, according to research by Jamilia Blake and colleagues from the Georgetown Law
As the co-author of a groundbreaking 2015 report on sexual trauma and juvenile justice, [Rebecca] Epstein’s one of the country’s leading experts on the issue. “In many ways, this case is an example of the system responding to a girl of color who has experienced trauma by punishing her,” Epstein said. “When we punish these
When it comes to faulty assumptions adults levy against black girls, there is perhaps no study more elucidating than Georgetown Law Center on Poverty and Inequality’s 2017 report Girlhood Interrupted: The Erasure of Black Girls’ Childhood. …The phenomenon, called “adultification,” can have a profound effect on the way black girls are treated, especially by law
The rate of girls in the juvenile justice system is increasing, according to a 2015 report Vafa coauthored with researchers from the Georgetown Law Center on Poverty and Inequality and the Ms. Foundation for Women. They found that those girls also experience sexual violence at disproportionate rates. Read the Full Article at Nashville Public Radio