For several years now, I have been part of a project to introduce the concept of collecting information about a young person’s identity, including sexual orientation and gender identity and expression in state youth serving systems, particularly juvenile justice.
There have been a number of anonymous surveys done around the county that found that 20% of youth involved in juvenile justice were LGBTQ or gender non-conforming.
The project I was involved in looked to see if this was true when used in systems around the country. Here in Ohio, we started with Montgomery, Lucas and Cuyahoga County. The project involved creating policies to respectfully and confidentially insure dignity while collecting this information. It involved creating space in data systems to hold this data and have it be available on a need to know basis only. And finally, it involved staff and bench training in how to collect this data.
In Ohio, we are finding that 15% of juvenile justice involved youth are identifying in some way as LGBTQ, and most of those who do identity are black girls. We have considered the 5% differential between the national data and Ohio data. One hypothesis is that the national data was anonymously collected and our Ohio data was not anonymous. For young people who have been traumatized by coming out or being outed, sharing again may be very uncomfortable.
We have grown this project over time to other Ohio counties. Data collection is just a first step. Once you can identify young people who are LGBTQ, and can confirm they are over represented in the system, a court can start to look at their services - are they LGBTQ inclusive - and the policies and attitudes of their referral partners in regards to LGBTQ young people.
We anecdotally know that family rejection plays a part in system involvement. Family rejection -> homelessness or couch hopping -> trading sex or other service for a bed -> that sex puts young person’s health at risk -> those other services land the young person in the juvenile court or child welfare system. And this is just one of many such scenarios.
If we can get to the root of this problem, family rejection, perhaps we could find the way to reduce system involvement by 15-20%.
Want to try this in your court? Email me at kim@klwconsultllc.com and let’s set up a time to talk.
