Starting With Girls and Their Resilience in Mind: Reconsidering Risk/Needs Assessments for System-Involved Girls

Abstract

Despite the numerous differences between boys and girls in the juvenile justice system, there are currently no gender-responsive risk/needs assessments for system-impacted girls, thereby limiting agencies to the use of gender-neutral risk/needs assessments. This article examines commonly used gender-neutral risk/needs assessments and illustrates how these instruments are not truly “neutral.” We argue that predictive validity is not enough to demonstrate effectiveness; these tools can harm and possibly discriminate against girls by placing them in similarly labeled risk categories (i.e., high, medium, low) as boys, despite engaging in less delinquency. This practice of force-fitting girls to assessments primarily developed for boys results in over- and misclassification of girls’ risk and fails to capture their gendered needs and resilience. We see this as an opportunity to reconsider risk assessments altogether for girls and propose a resilience/needs assessment may be better suited to identify girls’ needs and predict future behavior.