In early July, the Human Rights Project for Girls, the Georgetown Law Center on Poverty and Inequality and the Ms. Foundation for Women released a report, “The Sexual Abuse to Prison Pipeline: The Girls’ Story,” exposing the alarming link between victimization of girls and contact with the juvenile justice system. The Center for Children’s Law and Policy’s former Deputy Director, Dana Shoenberg, provided support for the project, which found that more than 80 percent of girls in some states’ juvenile justice facilities suffered sexual abuse before their incarceration. And, as the report notes, “in a perverse twist of justice, many girls who experience sexual abuse are routed into the justice system because of their victimization.” Read the full report.
