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Volume 2
Journal of Psychiatry and Mental Health Research
Psychiatry Nursing & Psychiatry 2019
June 17-18, 2019
Psychiatry & Mental health Nursing
Psychiatry and Mental Health
June 17-18, 2019 | Rome, Italy
4
th
World Congress on
2
nd
Global Experts Meeting on
&
Girls, trauma, and the institutional maze: The challenges of navigating institutional
control
Sanna King
University of Hawai
ʻ
i, USA
I
t is well documented that the majority of girls involved in the juvenile justice system have experienced some
form of trauma (Chesney-Lind 1999; Simkins, Hirsch, McNamara Horvat, and Moss 2004; Morris 2016;
Belknap &Holsinger 2006). This paper comes out of a five-year qualitative study examining youth punishment
in Hawaiʻi at a high school and various programs within the juvenile justice system on Oʻahu. This paper
focuses on the challenges girls experienced with navigating institutional control in Hawaiʻi. Girls in my study
had similar demographics, yet a range of experiences with trauma and engagement with support services. I
found that girls who had strong social support networks had more resiliency, an increase of engagement with
programs, and were able to find their way out of the “institutional maze”. I argue that an expanded definition
of trauma combined with strong networks of social support and services that incorporate appropriate cultural
models can impact girls ability to engage in institutional programs that encourage desistance to delinquency.
Biography
Sanna King Ph.D. received her Doctorate in Sociology from University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, USA, with a focus on feminist criminology,
colonial criminology, and social stratification-specifically juvenile justice, incarceration, re-entry, school violence and punishment, police
misconduct, deviance, and social control. Her M.A. from Columbia University is in American Studies, which followed her B.A. in
Ethnic Studies from University of California, San Diego. Her training includes youth development and therapeutic curriculums, crisis
intervention and mediation, domestic violence, focused curriculum development and facilitation, among several others. She also has
trained in working with incarcerated youth from intake and case management to discharge planning, reentry preparation, program
development and planning, and best practices research. She has taught various undergraduate criminology and social stratification
courses in the Sociology Department at University of Hawai’i and in the Criminal Justice Department at San Diego State University.
Her position as Assistant Professor of Sociology at Mississippi State University begins in the Fall of 2019. Her career, research and
study have been focused on at-risk youth. In addition to teaching at multiple universities, she also introduced writing workshops
to incarcerated youth at Riker’s Island Correctional Facility in New York for several years before moving to Hawaiʻi. In Hawaiʻi
she continued working with incarcerated and at-risk youth through facilitating writing workshops and therapeutic group-counseling
programs using the girls circle curriculum at juvenile detention facilities and a high school on Oʻahu, Hawaiʻi.
sannak@hawaii.eduJ Psych and Mental Health Research, Volume 2