Rebecca Epstein and Naomi Wadler

Rebecca Epstein, director of Georgetown Law's Center on Poverty and Inequality, with Naomi Wadler, student activist and youth advisor to Georgetown Law’s Center on Poverty and Inequality, at "Girlhood Interrupted" at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in 2019. Photo by Ralph Alswang.

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Gender Justice and Opportunity Initiative receives landmark support from #StartSmall

 December 15, 2022

“If we harness our collective power we can make an even bigger difference in the lives of girls,” says executive director Rebecca Epstein.

The Initiative on Gender Justice & Opportunity at Georgetown Law, which works to advance race and gender equity for girls and gender-expansive youth, has received an $800,000 gift from #StartSmall, Jack Dorsey’s philanthropic initiative for crisis relief, girls’ health and education, and universal basic income. It’s the largest single gift or grant the Initiative has received in their decade of work.

Rebecca Epstein, executive director of the Initiative and the Georgetown Law Center on Poverty and Inequality, said she is honored by #StartSmall’s unrestricted support to advocate on behalf of marginalized girls.

“It’s a generous testament to their trust in our work,” Epstein says, noting that the Initiative is completely donor- and grant-funded. “We appreciate that #StartSmall prioritized the needs of girls who have been so marginalized in law, research, and policy.”

Epstein explains that children face discrimination with little accountability by public systems, with Black girls especially vulnerable to both racial and gender discrimination.

“There’s no more powerful form of social justice than equality for young people, especially those who are pushed to the margin,” Epstein says. “Girls are traditionally both vulnerable and invisible; focusing on them is critical to achieving social justice for all.”

Training authority figures on adultification bias

The gift will be used over several years to hire more staff, deepen research, produce more reports and events, expand the youth advisors program, and establish more cross-campus partnerships, including with Georgetown’s Racial Justice Institute.

Epstein also plans to develop training opportunities on adultification bias, the phenomenon in which adults view Black girls as less innocent and more adult-like than their white peers. These trainings will be designed for adults with power in public systems—including judges, doctors, and police—who have authority and influence over Black girls’ lives.

“We previously identified this form of bias as a challenge and validated it by talking to women and girls about their life experiences,” Epstein says. “Now we’re turning to solutions, and how we stop this  harm to Black girls.”

Influencing policy and pop culture

The Initiative recently celebrated its 10-year anniversary. During the past decade, it has briefed policymakers at the U.S. Capitol on juvenile justice system reform, researched the domestic sex trafficking of girls and sexual abuse to prison pipeline, co-hosted a White House event about designing trauma-informed schools, produced the first set of quantitative data proving the existence of adultification bias and how it erases the childhood of Black girls, hosted book events on cutting edge issues affecting girls, participated in documentaries about the criminalization of Black girls, and advocated for the health and well-being of girls of color in school.

The Initiative’s work has even reached the executive branch; In 2015, just a few months after the release of the Initiative’s co-authored report, Sexual Abuse to Prison Pipeline: The Girls’ Story on the abuse to prison pipeline for girls, President Obama made reference to the report in a speech that committed to working on the issue to complement the work his administration was already doing on behalf of boys.

President Obama stated: “[W]hile boys face the school-to-prison pipeline, a lot of girls are facing a more sinister sexual-abuse-to-prison pipeline. Victims of early sexual abuse are more likely to fail in school, which can lead to sexual exploitation, which can lead to prison. So we’re focusing on boys, but we’re also investing in ways to change the odds for at-risk girls, to make sure that they are loved and valued, to give them a chance.”

“The Initiative’s work over the past decade has been profoundly influential,” says William Treanor, dean and executive vice president of Georgetown Law. “It has influenced courts. It’s been cited in opinions repeatedly. It’s influenced scholarship. The amount of times its research has been cited in books and articles is incredibly striking. And in a way that is really stunning, it’s also influenced popular discourse.”

The Initiative’s research on adultification bias has appeared in the television show #BlackAF and been tweeted by Viola Davis.

“It’s really a model of engaged scholarship that we encourage at Georgetown Law and is really at the heart of what we do,” Treanor continues. “I applaud everybody involved in the Initiative [for] what they’ve done over the past decade and I can’t wait to see what they do in the years ahead.”

Leading with gender justice

Mannone Butler (B’94, L’99), who serves as an attorney advisor to the Initiative and as a founding leader of the Black Alumni Council, says she thinks the Initiative’s gender justice framework is important to improving how the justice system treats Black girls and young women. When designing a system that rehabilitates, she believes restorative justice and understanding of how young people enter the justice system is key.

“The more we understand what contributes to young girls entering the juvenile justice system and the associated dire consequences, the more equipped and motivated we should be to employ prevention and intervention measures that limit their contact with the system,” Butler says.

Butler lauds how the Initiative conducts research in concert with young women and produces research that includes testimonies to amplify the voices of girls. During the 12 years that Butler worked for Washigton, D.C.’s Criminal Justice Coordinating Council, there was an increase in the number of girls involved in the justice system, prompting questions about the institutional policies and practices that may be contributing to this trend.

“This type of research allows us to zero in on the why,” Butler says. “It allows decision makers, policymakers, and practitioners to understand what’s really happening in the system.”

Although Georgetown Law alumni champion social justice in many forms, Butler believes the work of the Initiative is unique.

“I am not aware of any other effort that focuses on gender justice with such precision, such research cachet, and at the same time, such real-world, community-informed compassion and thoughtfulness,” she says. “This effort is a great example of the Law Center’s commitment to true justice, and I’m thrilled to be a part of it.”