Читать книгу The Invisible Woman - Joanne Belknap - Страница 60

Significantly, while it is important to hold parents and guardians of youth responsible and to expect them to be non-abusive/nonviolent, there is also a long history of holding mothers far more accountable than fathers for children’s failures (including delinquency) and well-being. Often such narratives are not only sexist but also fraught with racism and classism. A study of incarcerated mothers found white women were more likely than African American or Latina women to report “bad homes” and “poor parenting” as their pathways to prison (Enos, 2001). African American women reported their mothers and other caretakers “as doing the best they could” in parenting them, but “the temptations of the street were too much for them to resist”; and Latinas were more likely to attribute their pathways to “the lure of quick money through drug sales” (Enos, 2001, p. 57).

Numerous studies confirm PT and the disproportionately high rates of trauma, particularly sexual and physical abuse, experienced by incarcerated women and girls, rates far higher than those reported in the general population (e.g., Belknap & Holsinger, 2006; Bloom, Owen, Rosenbaum, & Deschenes, 2003; Browne, 1987; Browne, Miller, & Maguin, 1999; Coker, Patel, Krishnaswami, & Schmidt, 1998; S. L. Cook, Smith, Tusher, & Raiford, 2005; Daly, 1992; DeHart, 2008; Gaarder & Belknap, 2002; Gehring, 2018; Girshick, 1999; Grella, Lovinger, & Warda, 2013; P. C. Johnson, 2003; C. E. Jordan, Clark, Pritchard, & Charnigo, 2012; H. Klein & Chao, 1995; Lake, 1993; McDaniels-Wilson & Belknap, 2008; S. L. Miller, 2005; Owen, 1998; Richie, 1996, 2012; Sharp & Marcus-Mendoza, 2001; Singer, Bussey, Song, & Lunghofer, 1995). Significantly, PT has also been confirmed for men and boys in the studies that included them (Belknap & Holsinger, 2006; Dembo, Williams, Wothke, Schmeidler, & Brown, 1992; K. A. Dodge, Bates, & Pettit, 1990; R. D. Evans, Forsyth, & Gauthier, 2002; Gehring, 2018; C. E. Jordan et al., 2012). Belknap and Holsinger’s (2006) PT test of 444 incarcerated youth found that although the abuse variables were gendered (girls reported significantly more physical and sexual abuse than boys), boys’ abuse rates, including surviving sexual abuse, were still very high: Three fifths (59%) of girls disclosed having been sexually abused by at least one person and one fifth (19%) of boys disclosed this in the anonymous surveys. Given that boys are typically three quarters to four fifths of the youth we incarcerate, this is no small problem, just as it is not for the girls. Gehring’s (2018) study of women’s and men’s pretrial outcomes—whether they failed to appear (FTA) and whether they had a new arrest while in the community—found PT applied to both genders but did so in varied ways. For women, childhood abuse indirectly increased both FTA and new arrest likelihoods through mental health and substance abuse issues, and physical child abuse was directly related to new arrests. For women, “childhood abuse led to a history of mental illness which contributed to substance abuse and later pretrial failure” (p. 128). Alternatively, for men, no distinct pathway emerged: “While childhood abuse, a history of mental illness, and a history of substance abuse are related, they are not working together to influence men’s pretrial failure” (p. 128).

PT research is increasingly documenting the importance of including mental illness (Gehring, 2018; Green et al., 2016; S. M. Lynch et al., 2014) and sexual identity (Belknap, Holsinger, et al., 2012), racism (Arnold, 1990; Richie, 1996, 2012; Sommers & Baskin, 1994), school experiences (Belknap & Holsinger, 2006; Bloom et al., 2003; Gaarder & Belknap, 2002), and the intersections of various combinations of these variables to understand risks for actual offending and the likelihood of being labeled an offender, including when one is actually solely a victim (i.e., wrongfully identified, labeled, or convicted as an offender).