1Young Women and juvenile justice: Objectives, frameworks and strategies.

Before I begin, let me note that rather than the term “young women ” which I have so purposively used in the past, today I’m using the term “girl”, in deference to the move by some girls, as evidenced on the internet to “reclaim their power as girls” and to give a new and different connotation to the word (Carlip 1995:7). A good place to start reviewing present or considering future “Objectives, frameworks and strategies ” might be an examination of what we think we know about them. Unfortunately, girls are still barely visible in our theories, research and policy documents in juvenile justice. To take one example, while there has been a good deal of interest in recent years with a variety of juvenile justice practices often referred to under the same rubric of “Family Group Conferences”, girls experiences of such programs and the consequences for them have barely been identified, let alone seriously addressed in the mounting literature on these practices (an exception being the work of Jan Kitcher here in Adelaide)(Baines 1996). Almost at every turn in preparing this paper, as an academic and researcher, I was frustrated by the lack of good research to draw upon to fram