As the Amnesty International reports on the situation of male staff in women's prisons in the United States, and Madam Justice Arbour's Commission of Inquiry into Certain Events at the Prison for Women, have amply illustrated, strip-searching and male staff in women's prisons is an on-going issue. This is particularly the case when one considers the disincentives for women and girls to report harassment and sexual assault.

Within the institutional environment, the young women were taught they were individually responsible for their past and its shortcomings, and if they wanted to have a chance to succeed in the future they would need to change both themselves and their sense of self and accept the values of mainstream society that "many, if not most acts of aggression are taboo." … [These are] institutional attempts to place the sole responsibility for a resident's "problems" on the individual, forcing him or her to accept the institutional definition of the situation. (Stephens 164-165)

In addition, Stephens concluded that, "that young women can be, and are, violent, and that violent young women are not crazy or irrational but actually offer coherent explanations of how and why they choose to use violence" (167).

Women and Girls: Still Considered Too Few to Count

All young people suffer as a result of the lack of adequate support services and other systems-based deficiencies. Those who work with young people will be all too familiar with the erosion of resources and support for our community-based support systems for youth. The relatively small numbers of young women who are criminalized and enter the system, as compared to young men, result in even fewer services for young offenders in any community.

Young women are disproportionately disadvantaged as a result of a lack of gender-focussed community and institutional programming and services, and extremely limited access to open custody settings. The majority of young women who receive open custody dispositions must serve their sentences in secure custody and/or co-ed correctional facilities. Girls and young women also tend to have limited access to the services and programs, both in the community and in institutions. In many young offender centres across the country, incidences of sexual assault and/or pregnancies during custody have led to the further segregation of young women in correctional facilities. Young women are in real need of women-centred approaches in the youth justice system, as their needs are often ignored, or at best subsumed, by those of young men.

As Joan Sangster has identified in her historical review of young women in the juvenile justice system, female juvenile delinquency is a "social construction." Indeed, when they looked at who was actually in custody, Raymond Corrado, Candice Odgers and Irwin Cohen found that the majority of the young women who were sentenced to custody were there essentially for "protective" reasons and the offences for which they were convicted were relatively minor. They identify the lack of community-based, non-custodial placement options as the primary reason for what they refer to as "administrative-based incarceration." They also talk about the fact that the resistance of young women to authority and the resistance of the community to allow young women to return to their "street lives" is also a key factor in predisposing juvenile justice authorities to locking young women up in treatment and custodial programs.