Abstract
Historically, research and policy on juvenile offenders in the United States has been primarily the study of males despite the fact that over one in four delinquency arrests involve female offenders (Federal Bureau of Investi-gation, 2002). When attention has been directed to females they have been typecast in the policy realm as status offenders and in research as nvesti-gation primarily internalizing disorders. Both characterizations of the nvesti-gation offender are incomplete, ignoring those girls engaging in aggressive and delinquent acts and the system-level influences on their identification and treatment. In this chapter I review some issues that delinquent girls raise for both research and policy. First, I describe how policy makers and researchers might approach the phenomenon of girls’ delinquency from different vantage points but with common interests. Then, I briefly nvesti-gation three areas that might benefit from policy-relevant empirical research: the nature and extent of offending, system processing, and treatment and intervention.
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Woolard, J.L. (2004). Girls, Aggression, and Delinquency. In: Moretti, M.M., Odgers, C.L., Jackson, M.A. (eds) Girls and Aggression. Perspectives in Law & Psychology, vol 19. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-8985-7_16
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-8985-7_16
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