A Widening of the Net of Social Control?

Abstract

Young women's involvement with the U.S. juvenile justice system has grown rapidly over the last two decades. With this growth has come a proliferation of interventions intended to meet a 1992 federal initiative for correctional facilities and programs for adolescents to provide “gender-specific” services. In this article, we present the results of an inductive, qualitative evaluation of an art therapy program for institutionalized girls developed in response to this initiative. Using data from focus groups with young women and interviews with staff and administration, we demonstrate how the program, as it attempts to help them, also attempts to control the young women by reinforcing gendered notions of appropriateness. Examining assumptions about gender on which the program is based, as well as the notable absence of attention to issues of race, ethnicity, and class, we draw on the work of Foucault to consider how gender-specific treatment can serve to broaden social control over young women. We examine the young women's resistance to such regulation and consider implications for therapeutic intervention in an involuntary context.