Invisible Girls: Victimization, Teacher Support, and Pathways to Punishment for Black Girls

Black girls’ unique experiences of victimization, deviant behavior, and punishment are largely obscured from discourse on the cradle-to-prison pipeline. While there have been many studies that establish a link between victimization, offending, and criminalization, few quantitative studies capture the unique processes of resistance and punishment that victimized Black girls experience. Using data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult health, I explore the relationships between adolescent victimization, teacher support, and exclusionary punishment for Black and white girls. By centering the experiences of Black girls, I aim to generate a causal model that accounts for the ways in which exposure to violence and teacher-student relationships shape pathways to school-based criminalization