Gender Specific Intervention for Female Delinquents

Due to the increasing number of women involved in criminal activities, there is an urgent need for programs in the criminal system to increase the level of efficiency to meet the needs of young women or girls who somehow have broken the laws and have to be processed through the courts or be sent to prison. Currently, there are more wide-ranging figures regarding the distinctiveness of women in jails, there is very little information on female offenders in community reform surroundings or the environment.  The disregard of women in criminal justice studies has been defended on the grounds that women are generally less involved in crimes than males and account for only a small portion of all arrests.

This explanation does not take into account the fact that, women who are processed through the legal/criminal system, while fewer in number and less violent than their male counterparts, often become repeat offenders and are processed again and again through the system. Studies have pointed out that although community-based programs may be successful in dealing with the problems of female delinquents; few programs target the specific needs of girls and young women. Furthermore, little is known about the individuality of programs that serve women, or about the criteria or essentials that make for effective programs to endorse successful results.

Generally, female offenders are quite different from the male offenders in many important ways. For programs to be effective for female offenders they must be designed accordingly. For this, you need to ascertain to what levels of society they belong, their family background, whether they come from a broken home, is the mother or father a drug user or an alcoholic. You must ascertain what different factors of life may be responsible for their criminal behavior.  The possibilities of girls being sexually abused when young are three times more likely than with boys

Some basic facts about the life of women in the criminal systems need to be closely looked at such as who the girl/woman is, and the reasons for their criminal behavior/attitude.  In concentrating on the tremendous number of males in the criminal and juvenile justice systems, programs, policies and services often fail to develop a variety of options for dealing with the gender and culturally-specific problems of female offenders entangled in the system.. This negligence makes it crucially important to document program characteristics that are related to positive outcomes for females so that programs that show potential can be forwarded to criminal justice practitioners and policy makers.