American Indian Girls Often Fall Through the Cracks: "It's like these kids are living in a war zone"
Juvenile justice advocates who work with delinquent girls say they face challenges that boys don’t, and there aren’t enough programs that meet their needs. For example, girls are more than four times as likely as boys to have been physically or sexually abused, according to the National Women’s Law Center.
Delinquent girls are more likely than other girls to end up in the adult criminal justice system and are more likely to be dependent on social safety nets, according to Nona Jones of the PACE Center for Girls in Florida. They also are more likely to have children who end up in child protective services and the juvenile justice system. Girls who spend time in juvenile detention facilities are nearly five times more likely to die before age 29.
American Indian girls who collide with the juvenile justice system are particularly vulnerable, say legal advocates such as Terri Yellowhammer, an attorney with the Indian Child Welfare Law Center in Minneapolis who represents Native youth. Native girls are 40 percent more likely than white girls to be referred to a juvenile court for delinquency; 50 percent more likely to be detained; and 20 percent more likely to be adjudicated, according to the Office of Juvenile Justice. They are also more likely to face harsher sentences for the same offenses, said Joshua Rovner of The Sentencing Project.
American Indian girls in Wyoming have the highest rates of commitment to juvenile facilities (1,302 per 100,000), followed by Iowa (860), South Dakota (656), Oregon (568) and North Dakota (535).
In general, juvenile offender boys greatly outnumber girls, and that is true for Native boys, as well. But the disparities between American Indian boys and white boys aren't quite as great.
Many Native girls are geographically segregated and isolated, particularly if they’re living in urban areas away from their communities, advocates say. They’re more likely than white girls to be arrested for crimes that are only crimes because they are underage, so-called status offenses, such as drinking alcohol or running away from home. They’re also more likely to be arrested for family disputes, Yellowhammer said.
And once they are arrested, they get tangled in a web of state, local and tribal jurisdictions, said Erik Stegman, executive director of the Native American Youth Center at the Aspen Institute in Washington, DC. Law enforcement in Indian Country is uneven and exceedingly complicated, which hurts Native girls who run into trouble, he said.
According to the Tribal Court Clearinghouse, a database project of the Tribal Law and Policy Institute, tribal communities don’t have adequate funding to train law enforcement personnel and fund social service programs to combat juvenile delinquency.
Another complicating factor: Some tribes prosecute crimes and others do not, depending on tribal resources and capacity. As a result, Native girls often are prosecuted in the federal system, which doesn’t have a juvenile division. And if girls are arrested in the state system, the state usually doesn’t have to notify their tribes.
"We don't have a system that's nuanced enough to fit Native girls," Yellowhammer said.
Stegman of the Native American Youth Center agreed: "When a young girl is traumatized, what she needs is a variety of interventions at the community level. Unfortunately, children end up bearing the brunt of a very haphazard criminal justice system."
American Indians today face a legacy of inherited trauma, legal experts say. Beginning in the second half of the 19th century, Indian children were shipped off to boarding schoolsfar from their tribal communities and culture, in accordance with federal assimilation policies. Families were fractured.
The Indian Child Welfare Act of 1978 sought to right that situation, making it a priority to find homes for displaced American Indian children within their own tribe. In theory, the law is supposed to provide rights for families and tribes. But in practice, the law creates an extra layer of bureaucracy; with no one agency taking ownership of a child’s case, leaving children to languish in the system, said Sue Mangold, executive director of the Juvenile Law Center. Children that grew up without parents become parents who don't know how to raise children, juvenile advocates say.
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