It's all in the denominator: trends in the processing of girls in Canada's youth courts.

• Author: Sprott, Jane B.

In attempts to understand youth crime in Canada, many scholars have examined trends in police charging and youth court processing of young offenders throughout the 1980s and 1990s. There appears to be general agreement that the rate at which young people are charged has increased under the Young Offenders Act (Carrington 1999). Further examination of the data, however, suggests that this increase is due more to a change in the exercise of police discretion--less diversion--than to a change in actual offending rates (see Carrington 1999, for a full review).

Analyses of youth court processing reveal that over the years there has been provincial variation in the rate of bringing youths into court (Doob and Sprott 1996). However, most of these analyses of trends do not examine girls in much detail. When youth court trends involving girls are examined, people tend to look at the percentage of cases involving girls and highlight the finding that girls are accounting for larger proportions of youth court cases (Sudworth and deSouza 2001; Reitsma-Street 1999). For example, an easily available summary of the data on youth court processing from the Canadian Centre for Justice Statistics provides the percentage of cases involving females and notes that "court cases against females have risen slowly ... [and that] this increase was reflected in most categories of offences" (Sudworth and deSouza 2001: 6). Others have also noted that the "[o]ne area that relates both to the perception regarding an increase in violence, as well as an actual increasing incidence rate, is with adolescent girls. Violence with adolescent girls is the only area consistently showing an increase in reported rates of violent offending" (Leschied, Cummings, Van Brunschot, Cunningham, and Saunders 2001: 201). In attempting to explain the increased involvement of girls in the youth justice system, some have suggested that girls' behaviour is changing (e.g., Leschied et al. 2001; Gabor 1999). Others, however, have suggested that the youth justice system is changing in the way in which it treats girls in general or with respect to certain types of offences (see Reitsma-Street 1999).

Given that there is interest in the apparent increased involvement of girls in the youth justice system, data from the last decade should be carefully examined. This paper examines these data and describes two different trends: increases in the proportion of youth court cases involving girls, on the one...