Stress, teenage mother hood, drug habits all those components needs survival skills. How do you keep those survival skills? Gangs, prostitution, abuse? To us juvenile delinquency is something that we look at it with disdain instead of taking the time to look into sociological issues, emotional issues and the reality that would give us a clearer view and still not make us feel or understand the conditions they live in, the pressures they go through or face everyday. For us to be able to make a non judgmental opinion is very difficult, perhaps many of us have been affected by the wrong doings of some delinquent’s actions such as a drive by shooting, being at the wrong place at the wrong time. The realization, what we call going through a day, everyday, is a day they’ve survived. True there are other options to those girls, but realistically how many are able to go and get out as easy as those programs claim it is? The emotion I used to write this paper was compassion. I believe that because of that emotion I was able to bring a difference to the view of the female delinquent. State juvenile justice systems across the country are challenged by the question: What about girls? This question cannot be ignored because female involvement in the juvenile justice system continues on a steady course upward -- even as juvenile male involvement in delinquency declines. Between 1992 and 1996 the number of juvenile females arrested for Violent Crime Index offenses increased 25 percent, with no increase in arrests of male juveniles for the same offenses. Juvenile female arrests for Property Crime Index offenses increased 21 percent, while juvenile male arrests in this category decreased 4 percent. Law enforcement agencies made 723,000 arrests of juvenile females in 1996 (Snyder, 1997). Female involvement in the juvenile justice system, once seen as an anomaly, has evolved into a significant trend. State and local juvenile justice sys...
