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- Paperback ISBN: 9781552664360
- Paperback Price: $19.95 CAD
- Publication Date: Sep 2011
- Pages: 208
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Examination Copy
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Request Examination CopyGoverning Girls
Rehabilitation in the Age of Risk
Christie Barron
In recent years there has been significant media hype and moral panic over assaults and violent crimes perpetrated by young women. The governmental response to control crime and to provide protection to citizens has taken various, often contradictory, forms. The current research agenda on controlling youth violence in Canada, especially in light of provisions in the Youth Criminal Justice Act, is focused on risk assessment. The approach, however, ignores how “risk” is a socio-cultural phenomenon. Through interviews with young female offenders and youth justice authorities, Governing Girls examines female youth violence in the contemporary landscape of control and the increasing reliance on risk assessment tools to classify and manage youths’ level of risk. Exploring the meaning of treatment and rehabilitation in the age of risk, as well as analyzing the gender, race and class dimensions of the risk construct, Christie L. Barron questions the impact of risk rationality and argues that actuarial technologies depoliticize the process of control and further exclude and marginalize young female offenders.
Contents
Introduction • Theoretical and Methodological Framework • Managing the Young Female Offender • Girls’ Risk/Need Factors • Punishing the Young Female Offender • “Rehabilitating” and Treating the Young Female Offender • The Impact of Risk Governance on Subjectivity • Effectively Reducing “Risk” • References
Excerpt
Reviews
Review in Herizons Magazine
In recent years, mainstream Canadian media has become increasingly preoccupied with girl violence, to such an extent that it seems as if the trend of teenaged girls committing crimes is on the rise. Christie Barron, in her latest book, Governing Girls, exposes how the media’s emphasis on female violence is not the outcome of more crimes, but rather a reflection of how the changes to the structural policies guiding the youth justice system have resulted in a greater–and more fearful–public consciousness of female youth offenders.
Barron argues that the shift in Canada’s youth justice system to a more actuarial style of justice has imposed myriad negative consequences upon at-risk girls. Skilfully, Barron provides a gendered critique of how at-risk females transgress tranditional gender boundaries. For example, the current youth justice system conceptualizes deliquent girls as those who engage in sexually immoral behaviour, run away from home and act out. Barron also shows how female aggression is understood largely in relation to male behaviour. Risky girls tend to be the ones who display hyper-masculine identities.
Barron takes the conversation beyond a gendered critique of what constitutes an at-risk profile by showing how racism plays out within the context of girl violence. As the current youth justice system is set up, the onus is on the individual to govern his or her own behaviour. In that process, according to Barron, entire systems of oppression, such as racism, are erased from the social consciousness of what factors influence deviant behaviour. Without understanding the social, political and economic contexts that shape female violence, the rehabilitiaion efforts to reform at-risk youth continue to fail.
Without doubt, Governing Girls is an insightful book. Although Barron could rely less on jargon to explain concepts such as risk and risk management, she nonetheless presents a fascinating critique of how Canada’s youth justice system is failing at-risk girls.–Katie Palmer, Herizons Spring 2012