One of the best parts of my life has been the opportunities that I have had over the years to catalyze and support new organizations, projects and initiatives. I am currently privileged to collaborate with a leadership team of young women of color who have worked tirelessly over the past few months to re-launch an initiative called Girl Talk. My friend Laurie Schaffner also plays an integral role in Girl Talk and it is a pleasure to work with her as well.

Currently Girl Talk consists of bi-weekly film screenings accompanied by an art project on Saturday afternoons in the Cook County Juvenile Temporary Detention Center (JTDC). The films we have selected feature a young female protagonist who faces challenges and ultimately triumphs. After the movie concludes, the incarcerated girls and Girl Talk volunteers work together in small groups to discuss the movies’ themes and work on related art projects.

Girl Talk hosted a dinner and dialogue event last night which was well-attended and informative. In preparation for this event, the leadership team decided to craft a statement of policy and values for Girl Talk. I have been calling it to Girl Talk “manifesto”. You can read the whole statement here (PDF).

Below is an excerpt from the Girl Talk “manifesto”:

Girl Talk believes that it is impossible to provide “gender-responsive” services and programming within an inherently oppressive system that exerts brutal social control over its charges. What we know for sure is that any contact with the juvenile justice system is bad for girls. We also take issue with typical “gender-responsive” programs that intend to redirect adolescent young women’s socialization processes towards mainstream dominant norms for feminine, law-abiding behavior. The underlying position of the Girl Talk curricula is to honor young women and their abilities to grow into strong adults with self-love and purpose.

Girl Talk believes that locating the social problem of girls in conflict with the law as individual “poor choices” that girls make, misses the underlying social forces such as homophobia, violence, racism, sexism, and poverty in which young women live. Gender-specific intervention policies are not necessarily feminist, anti-racist, restorative or critical of the status quo. This is where Girl Talk enters the policy debates over “what is gender-responsive policy and is it good for girls?” Gender-focused programs fail to address the obvious racial disparity between those on the inside and those on the outside, as well as neglect to notice the violence that poverty inflicts in the lives of incarcerated girls. In so doing they miss the opportunity to provide places where young women can articulate their own truths and to find inspiring solutions to the very real challenges faced by young women who come to the attention of juvenile legal authorities.

Although “gender-specific policy” and “culturally appropriate” approaches to working with youth who have transgressed laws have become buzzwords in official juvenile legal system literature, very little mention is ever made in juvenile detention facility practice and procedural manuals that pertain specifically to girls’ unique challenges and strengths. Often the only place where girls are mentioned is in outlining specific nutrition needs for those who are pregnant or lactating. Furthermore, criminologist and juvenile delinquency literature authors focus on the individual offender and his/her (in)ability to make positive choices. Deploying a critical multicultural feminist model to understand youth in trouble broadens our perspective towards seeing youth as being in crisis, rather than youth being the crisis. Thus, our unit of analysis focuses on the juvenile legal system itself, and its punitive approach to dire situations in which children find themselves. This shift provides theoretical and analytic room to deepen our understanding of the ways that unmet social, cultural, educational, physical, mental, and emotional needs of girl children may be linked to later court-involvement.

Note: Girl Talk is hosting its next informational session for interested volunteers on May 14th. Information can be accessed here.