Title:Why Are Arrests for D.C. Girls So High?

Nataly Del Valle is a recent graduate of the University of the District of Columbia who works as a youth peer advocate at the D.C. Department of Youth Rehabilitation Services. She’s a successful young woman excited about a career path of helping at-risk young people in the District.

She also remembers her former life when she was in D.C.’s foster-care system, caught stealing, arrested, and led away in handcuffs after an altercation with her grandmother.

New research conducted by Georgetown Law Center’s Juvenile Justice Initiative (JJI) shows that arrests of girls in D.C. have risen by 87 percent over the last decade, while overall arrests for boys have dropped 22 percent. Black girls (defined as under age 18) are 30 times more likely to be arrested than their white female and male peers.

Del Valle’s experience gives these statistics a story. She has become a spokesperson on the issue, appearing on WAMU Radio’s “The Kojo Nnamdi Show” in April. With her on the program was Eduardo Ferrer (B’02, L’05), JJI policy director. Ferrer led the research study and authored the report “Beyond the Walls: A Look at Girls in D.C.’s Juvenile Justice System” with the human-rights organization Rights4Girls.

Ferrer had heard about gender disparity in arrests anecdotally, which was the impetus for the study. “While the trend is consistent nationwide, the increase is disproportionate in D.C.,” he says.

The research also shows that girls are being arrested at younger ages and for less-serious crimes—simple assault, truancy, shoplifting, public disturbance—than boys. “It’s evident that young girls’ behavior is increasingly becoming criminalized,” Ferrer says.

The new research is consistent with other findings coming out of Georgetown Law’s Center on Poverty and Inequality, which found that adults view Black girls as less innocent and less needing of protection and nurturing than white girls.

Established in 2015, JJI works to improve the level of representation that youth receive in the region and make D.C.’s juvenile justice system the smallest and best in the country. The Initiative grew out of the Law Center’s pioneering Juvenile Justice Clinic, which trains law students under faculty supervision to represent D.C. youth in legal cases.

With the research in hand, Ferrer says future work can focus on investment at the community level. In addition to pervasive issues like poverty and lack of family and school support, girls are more likely to be victims of trauma, including sexual abuse, than boys. “We know what to do,” Ferrer says. “We know where to invest; we know we can have trauma counseling and support.”

As for Nataly Del Valle, she says, “The thing is for me is to give back to the community. I went through what I did for a reason.”