Imagine being a 13-year-old girl and being raped by someone who is supposed to protect and love you, then fleeing only to land in the hands of police who arrested you for truancy or landing in the hands of a pimp and eventually being arrested for prostitution.
Instead of helping, the criminal justice system is punishing Black and Brown girls for being victims of sexual abuse, according to a Human Rights Project for Girls report called: The Sexual Abuse to Prison Pipeline: The Girl’s Story.
“When poor Black and Brown girls are bought and sold for sex, they are rarely regarded or treated as victims of trafficking. Instead, they are children jailed for prostitution,” wrote report author Malika Saada Saar.
Sex abuse victim Nadiyah Shereff said, “I was locked up ten different times within a two year period. Inside Juvie I met other girls like myself who were there for prostitution, running away and truancy. All of us were from the same neighborhoods, poor families, and seemed to have the same disposition of trauma, anger mixed with hopelessness. We were not violent girls. We were girls who were hurting,” according to the report.
“Sexual abuse is one of the primary predictors of girls’ detention,” said Saar.
Eighty-one percent of the girls locked up in California and South Carolina reported sexual abuse, said the report.
In Oregon, 93 percent of the girls in its juvenile justice system experienced sexual or physical abuse.
The FBI reported AfricanAmerican children make up 59 percent of all prostitution related arrests under 18 years old in America.
Girls under 18 make up 76 percent of all prostitution arrests.
In South Carolina, the caregiver sexually abused 69 percent of the girls and dating violence occurred with 42 percent. African-American girls are 33.2 percent of the youth incarcerated, but only 14 percent of the general population, according to the report.
The system views the way victims respond to rape as crimes. Criminal offenses that are common responses to living in abusive environments include truancy, substance abuse and running away.
“Once inside, girls encounter a system that is often ill-equipped to identify and treat the violence and trauma that lie at the root of victimized girls’ arrests. More harmful still is the significant risk that the punitive environment will re-trigger girls’ trauma and even subject them to new incidents of sexual victimization, which can exponentially compound the profound harms inflicted by the original abuse,” said Saar.
The Human Rights Project for Girls Report offered several suggestions as steps to close the sexual abuse to prison pipeline.
In sum, they recommended training staff to be aware of the effects of sexual abuse and to treat its victims as victims, including abolishing zero-tolerance school disciplinary policies for sex-abuse victims and attacking the buyer’s demand for sleeping with minors instead of focusing on the abused, along with granting immunity to trafficked youth or funding diversion programs that help provide child victims with family support services, life skills training, and assistance with job placement, housing, education and vocational skills.
“We must surface the hidden and disregarded realities of how vulnerable Black and Brown girls are treated differently, and indeed punished, for their experiences of sexual and physical abuse. We cannot continue to leave them behind because their lives matter,” said Saar.
