Research & Reports
Rights4Girls produces critical publications that shed light on some of the most pressing issues facing young women and girls today. Our innovative research and reports uplift the distinct, and often untold, experiences of marginalized girls and offer solutions to meet their specific needs.
Too often, girls are invisible and their lives are left out of important conversations about issues and systems impacting their well-being. Exacerbating this issue is the dearth of data on girls of color and other youth who have been pushed to the margins. Rights4Girls’ research helps to fill this void by illuminating the ways in which marginalized girls are impacted by violence and by systems, as well as identifying gender-responsive, culturally appropriate solutions to address systemic inequities.
Our first report, The Sexual Abuse to Prison Pipeline: The Girls’ Story, exposed the ways in which girls — and especially girls of color — were being criminalized as a direct result of suffering violence and trauma. Our groundbreaking report helped to reshape the conversation around justice reform to be more inclusive of girls’ experiences and inspired national efforts to dismantle policies that criminalize survivors of violence.
We continued to bring hidden issues impacting vulnerable girls to the forefront through the publication of Survivor Protection: Reducing the Risk of Trauma to Child Sex Trafficking Victims and Beyond the Walls: A Look at Girls in D.C.’s Juvenile Justice System. We also recognized the need to elevate girls’ voices through the release of I Am the Voice: Girls’ Reflections from Inside the Justice System, a compilation of art and poetry created by girls in the juvenile justice system. Our latest report, Criminalized Survivors: Today’s Abuse to Prison Pipeline for Girls, re-visits the state of the pipeline in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement, the #MeToo movement, and the pandemic—and finds that we are not just allowing girls to fall through the cracks – we are still actively punishing survivors, rather than helping them heal. The report highlights three new and urgent pathways to confinement for girls while also recognizing some of the key progress that has been made since our initial report in 2015.
In addition to our publications, we create other resources that lay bare the connections between gender, race, violence and system-involvement. As a result of our groundbreaking research and unique racial and gender lens, Rights4Girls has become a go-to resource for information on girls of color impacted by violence and systems-involvement.
Visit our Resources page to download our reports and other research materials.
