Growing up in her Compton neighborhood, Dominique became a gangbanger almost by default. The rough crew she ran with were the only people she thought she could trust; they could relate to being 14 years old and on your own because your mother is in jail on a drug charge.
She is now 16, a convicted felon herself, with a 3-month-old son and enough emotional scars to convince her that hanging out with the wrong crowd may not be a worthy life goal after all. For the last 10 months, her home has been Camp Scott, the all-girl detention center run by the Los Angeles County Probation Department amid the rugged hills and whispering pines in Saugus.
Girls like Dominique are filling up probation camps and juvenile halls at an alarming pace, so much so that Los Angeles officials have turned a formerly all-boys camp in Lancaster into a coed one to absorb the overflow.
Even as overall rates of juvenile crime are declining, girls are making up a larger proportion of youngsters who are arrested, jailed and on probation. Girls under 18 constituted 27% of all U.S. juvenile arrests in 1999, up from 22% in 1986. In Los Angeles County, girls accounted for 23% of juvenile arrests in 1999, up from 19% in 1995.
Nationally, violent crimes committed by girls rose 75% from 1980 to 1999.
The numbers have jolted law enforcement officials, who are shifting from their historical focus on male juvenile delinquents to create more intervention and prevention programs aimed at girls.
In Washington, the federal Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency is creating a National Girls Institute, which will be the first nationwide repository of information devoted to female delinquency and its prevention.
And a recently released report, "Justice by Gender," issued jointly by the American Bar Assn. and the nation's largest black legal group, the National Bar Assn., concludes that girls are ill-served at every step of the juvenile justice system.
"The juvenile justice system historically has been built around boys' problems and the response to girls has been to walk in, paint the walls pink and take out the urinals," said Meda Chesney-Lind, a University of Hawaii researcher who contributed to the bar associations' study.
