Re-imagining Justice for Girls: A New Agenda for Research

This article argues that justice for girls has been narrowly conceived as the delivery of gender-specific interventions within a correctional framework. I contend that the translation of feminist pathways research into gender-specific programming (GSP) has inherent logic flaws and that GSP makes unwarranted assumptions about girls' routes into and out of offending. In addition, by translating girls' victimisation histories into individualised intervenable risks/needs, state welfare (non-)responses to them are ignored. I argue that a new feminist research agenda is required which implies a more expansive conceptualisation of justice and which investigates meso-level welfare institutional cultures and practices with troubled girls.