New Human Rights Report on Sexual Abuse of Girls to Prison Pipeline

 "Sexual abuse is one of the primary predictors of girls’ entry into the juvenile justice system...Once inside, girls encounter a system that is often ill-equipped to identify and treat the violence and trauma that lie at the root of victimized girls’ arrests. More harmful still is the significant risk that the punitive environment will re-trigger girls’ trauma and even subject them to new incidents of sexual victimization, which can exponentially compound the profound harms inflicted by the original abuse."

So informs the introduction to a new report highlighting the victimization of young girls who are ferried through the maze of the juvenile justice system when the crime was not theirs but that of the predators who sexually abused them.  The report is a collaboration between Human Rights Project for Girls, Georgetown's Center on Poverty and Inequality, and The Ms. Foundation for Women,

"Once inside, girls encounter a system that is often ill-equipped to identify and treat the violence and trauma that lie at the root of victimized girls’ arrests. 

The report exposes various ways in which various systems criminalize girls, particularly girls of color.  Trauma based treatment, which is the needed response is typically overlooked.  The report addresses the over representation of sexually non-conforming juveniles and is generally a good source of statistics supporting the research that is the basis of the report.