Labelling Young Women as Violent: Vilification of the Most Vulnerable

Executive Summary

Violent crime committed by young people has decreased in recent years. At the same time, calls for harsher punishment of youth mount. The resulting tension of competing interests and objectives generated by misinformation and media coverage of high profile, violent crime involving youth is embodied in the proposed Youth Criminal Justice Act (YCJA). The legislation incorporates the punitive and progressive criminal justice agenda. While providing more regressive sentencing options for young people convicted of the most serious offences, the YCJA also embodies the commitment of the federal government to reduce reliance on incarceration as exemplified by the emphasis on extra-judicial measures.

Against this backdrop of current juvenile justice reform measures, this paper explores the factors contributing to the reality that poor, young, racialized women and girls are among the fastest growing prison populations world-wide. The so-called "War on Drugs," evisceration of education, health and other social support services, and "gender-neutral" zero tolerance policies have contributed significantly to this phenomenon. Furthermore, too many imprisoned women and girls are over-classified in terms of their security risks to the general public.

Around the world, we are seeing that women and girls with cognitive and/or mental disabilities are more likely to be criminalized, jailed, and then classified as maximum security prisoners. Many of them were previously institutionalized in psychiatric hospitals and/or involved in other mental health services. Many are criminalized as a result of their disability-induced behaviour in institutions and/or the community.

We enter this century and millennium with the ever-present and persistent challenge of ensuring that women and girls behind prison walls have access to justice. As the economic, social, and political climates within our provinces and territories continue to produce ever more daunting challenges to the survival of the most marginalized, we also struggle to resist the rush to vilify women and girls. This paper will highlight the key issues, research, and approaches recommended to address these matters and strengthen commitment to equality and justice for women and girls.

Background

There is a pressing need to counter misinformation about the nature and extent of young women's violence. A few years ago, I was alerted to this as a result of a call I received from a reporter. He asked me whether I would be prepared to do an interview about the increase in violent offending by young women. "What increase?" was my response. He said his local police source had advised him that their community had seen a 200 per cent increase in robbery offences alone over the past decade. When I asked him how many actual cases those figures represented, he was not certain.