Gendered Treatment: Girls and Treatment Orders in Bail Court

Abstract

Historically, girls, more so than boys, have been the recipients of rehabilitative efforts within the youth justice system. While the rehabilitative focus of youth justice legislation has diminished over the decades, there is still concern that girls may be more likely than boys to be recipients of treatment-based responses. We investigated this at the pre-trial stage, examining bail conditions placed on youths. Examining a sample of bail cases from a large youth court in Toronto, extending from April 2003 through to December 2008, we found that girls were significantly more likely than boys to be given a condition of attending a “treatment program,” especially if the offence was a minor non-violent offence. While the Youth Criminal Justice Act (YCJA) is very clear that youths cannot be detained or sentenced to custody for child welfare reasons (ss. 29 and 39(5)), there is nothing that explicitly prohibits the imposition of “rehabilitative” bail conditions. While the paternalistic treatment/rehabilitation efforts from earlier in the twentieth century may have faded considerably ( Sprott and Doob 2009 ), they appear to cast a long shadow, especially over girls in the bail process.