Crossing Over: Girls at the Intersection of Juvenile Justice, Criminal Justice, and Child Welfare

Abstract

Both within and across service systems, a girl’s pathway into a service system clearly affects the framing of her “problem” and what “type” of juvenile she is. Captured almost 25 years ago in a Florida report entitled “Mad, Bad, Sad, Can’t Add?” (Friedman and Kutash 1986), the focus on systems of care for children’s mental health has grown into a national movement with evidence-based practices and theories of change (e.g., Hodges et al. 2008; Stroul and Blau 2008). A coordinated approach across service systems is not yet widespread for youth engaged in juvenile justice and child welfare systems, although several templates for serving such youth do exist (see Cocozza et al. 2008; Kamradt et al. 2008; McCarthy et al. 2008). Weithorn (2005) eloquently describes how a single child could be viewed quite differently, both in terms of etiology and appropriate responses, depending whether she was first “identified” by the health care system, mental health system, child welfare system, juvenile justice system, or educational system.