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What are sociolegal, cultural, and emotional premises beneath conceptualizations of parenting skills for parents of juvenile offenders? This study examined court-ordered parenting skills classes taught by juvenile probation department personnel at a Northern California juvenile detention facility. Three conflicting perspectives arose in the classes: the juvenile court's perspective, where delinquency was framed as a result of poor parenting that state intervention could rectify; the parents' perspective, where parenting was seen as part of the feeling world of family life; and an adult solidarity perspective, where probation officials and parents agreed that youths were bad, out of control, disrespectful—a type of demonization of the youths by all the adults.

Young women adjudicated delinquent in juvenile court report suffering inordinate amounts of emotional, physical, and sexual trauma in early childhood and adolescence. In addition, adolescent girls' arrests for violent crimes rose dramatically in the 1990s. This article explores the relationship between those two factors. Drawing from interviews with court-involved girls, this article highlights two contexts in which girls committed aggressive offenses: an incidence of intimate violence in a lesbian relationship and a stabbing in self-defense against sexual assault. I argue that the trauma witnessed and experienced from prior childhood and adolescent injuries—much of it experienced in private—contributed to girls' coming to the attention of public authorities.

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