"Young Lady! To the Front Office!"

How Rigid Gender Identities Fail Young Delinquent Girls and Keep Them From Getting Help

Written by Raouda Njimogna

I used to have a pretty loud voice. It transcended classrooms and echoed down halls, or at least that was how it was described by my teachers, who told me to hush. Those silencings led to my perpetual silence throughout middle school and high school. I'd sit in my seat listening to teachers, lectures, classmates — their chatter often louder than anything I ever uttered. I wasn't alone in my silence. Most of the girls in my classes withheld their voices, only speaking when prompted or hesitantly when they wished to answer. The boys were confidently setting the tone of the classroom and were rarely reprimanded for going above the allotted decibel level. "Boys will be boys", that was the only warning we got upon entering classrooms —you had to accept the boys to talk and act in cacophony. Not all of them would join in discordance. There were quiet boys, and they, like I and the other quiet girls, evaded criticism; unless there was a violent nature to the exuberant boys, they, too, evaded criticism and scrutiny from the teacher. Boys were allowed to be on both ends of the sonic spectrum and accepted into the learning environment. The question lies in whether girls were given such grace as well.

Gender conditioning has affected us all. Though we are all individuals, we all live in a society that presents us with social and cultural norms. Across various cultures, gender identity is integral as it instills blatant and sometimes covert gender roles and expectations among us. In the West, where Abrahamic religions are popular and often used as metrics for moral and ethical codes, the concept of a woman is one painted in submission, chastity, and sociability, whereas the concept of a man is dominance, logic, and strength. Any deviation of these traits renders an individual "strange" or undesired by the masses. In the classroom, where there is a power dynamic between teacher and student, certain traits are more desired within students than others. For instance, since the teacher is a figure of authority, students must be somewhat submissive to instruction but independent in their learning. Submission is conditioned among girls, while independence is typically cultivated in boys. For these reasons, well-behaved girls and assertive boys are expected by teachers.

However, human beings, despite our extensive social conditioning, are imperfect patterns— not every boy or girl will act as they were told to. Delinquency or disruptive behaviors in children are apparent in classroom settings, as it is an environment where discipline is expected and enforced. Despite the main cause of delinquency being unhealthy parenting, socioeconomic conditions, trauma, and other childhood factors, there are some gender differences in how delinquency is viewed and treated. Delinquency is seen more as a "boy" trait due to the "boys will be boys" mentality that confuses the assertive trait trained in boys with unabashed roughness and attitude. Some of these delinquent boys are diagnosed or at least screened for antisocial personality disorder (ASPD), a personality disorder characterized by an incessant and natural disregard for social norms, which can manifest in aggression, manipulation, impulsiveness, and a lack of empathy. It's interesting how some of these traits seem to loosely align with how most men are characterized, but it's not shocking.

Many psychological experiments that have led to the discovery of these personality disorders mainly used male subjects as their personality litmus. Women were often left out of these studies, yet were still subjected to their diagnostic traits. There is also an exclusion of the social norms of different cultures within the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM)— a standardized metric for diagnosing and classifying mental disorders and illnesses, which often favors Western social norms and their deviations. When it comes to ASPD, women are often underdiagnosed due to not exhibiting defiance of their social conditioning and norms that match the standardized way. Instead of giving these young girls insight into a possible mental disorder, they are labeled "troubled girls" and not as helped as their male peers. In fact, they are more often rejected and scrutinized for their nonconformity. Their increased rejection leads to more isolation, furthering the development of ASPD, depression, and its many symptoms.

In classroom settings, both defiant girls and boys are taken out of classrooms and ostracized to a varying degree, which detracts from their development, making them more susceptible to poor interpersonal relationships, substance abuse, depression, and drastic consequences of impulsive behaviors. Prepubescent delinquent young girls tend to have a harder transition period into adolescence than their male counterparts, due to the higher scrutiny they face, as they do not get to have the "boys will be boys" excuse, for they stray too far and too much from their accepted gender and social identity. These young girls often form a poorer perception of relationships than young boys, either being too avoidant or anxious in their attachment. If help was offered instead of shame painted in rigid gender stereotypes, these girls could have been screened and tested for ASPD and offered mental healthcare to aid them through adolescence and its integral and confusing developmental conflicts.