That’s the Sound of the Police

Abstract

Among lesbian/gay/bisexual/transgender and questioning youth, queer women, transgender, and gender nonconforming youth have been particularly marginalized in social science research, social service settings, and the community, where they are especially vulnerable to violence and significantly more likely to become involved in law enforcement. This is particularly the case for queer young women, transgender, and gender nonconforming youth of color and low-income youth. This article is based on life history interviews with young adults, aged 18–25, who have been incarcerated in girls’ detention facilities in the juvenile justice system in New York State. Interviews were analyzed using the Listening Guide and revealed themes related to the prevalence of interpersonal and state-sanctioned violence in participants’ lives, participants’ tremendous capacity for resiliency, and creative modes of healing.

Introduction

In their book, Queer (In)Justice, Joey Mogul, Andrea Ritchie, and Kay Whitlock (2011) argue that criminalizing tropes about queer and transgender people has become solidified within legal discourses, where they are repeatedly used to classify queer and trans folks within criminal cases. These tropes of criminality and deviance undergird juvenile correctional systems, policing, court-based processes, and social service provision and have been tacked on to the bodies and lived experiences of lesbian/gay/bisexual/transgender and questioning (LGBTQ) young people. These tropes are also raced, classed, gendered, nationalized, and embedded in historical narratives about the place and worth of lives within the colonial project that has been the basis of U.S. nation-building pursuits and a continually unfolding national identity. Unfortunately, they remain the lens through which policy is shaped and articulated, social service systems are structured and funded, legal processes are carried out, and prison expansion is justified. Within a current national context of unprecedented attention to police brutality perpetrated against communities of color, conversations regarding the distinct experiences of women and LGBTQ young people of color have been marginalized, despite the fact that they experience unwanted attention and violence at the hands of law enforcement that takes place within a context of racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, and adultism, among other systems of power and privilege.

This silence is largely echoed in research, so that within the already sparse body of research on LGBTQ youth’s experiences, the lives and experiences of queer or same-sex practicing women and transgender young people occupy a particularly marginalized place. Recent findings confirm that LGBTQ youth are overrepresented within the child welfare system (Wilson, Cooper, Kastanis, & Nezhad, 2014), among homeless youth populations (Whitbeck, Chen, Hoyt, Tyler, & Johnson, 2004), and in the juvenile justice system in the United States (Irvine, 2010). Because racial disproportionality is also a reality within each of these systems, it follows that the majority of LGBTQ youth in these systems are also youth of color. Overrepresentation and movement between multiple systems result in young people’s ensnarement in a system of revolving doors, in which they are denied access to opportunity structures (Mountz, 2011). Constant movement between systems also makes youth more likely to land in public spaces that are hyperpoliced within a context of the quality of life ordinances that have come to dominate the landscape of cities like New York (Gibson, 2011).

A small number of research studies have begun to explore the relationship between juvenile justice involvement, court processes, and same-sex attraction; gender nonconformity; and gender identity among young people who are placed in facilities designated as being “for girls.” In “We’ve Had Three of Them,” Angela Irvine (2010) discusses the findings from 2,100 surveys administered in six jurisdictions around the country, which indicate that 15% of youth in those juvenile justice systems identify themselves as LGBT, are questioning their sexual orientation, and/or express their gender in nonconforming ways, despite the still prevalently held belief that few LGBTQ youth enter the juvenile justice system. She found that 27% of self-identified girls surveyed reported that they were LGBTQ, compared to only 8% of self-identified boys and came to the conclusion that lesbian, bisexual, questioning, and gender nonconforming girls remain more invisible in these systems than gay, bisexual, questioning, and gender nonconforming boys. She additionally confirms that these youth are more likely than heterosexual and/or gender-normative peers to have entered the juvenile justice system because they ran away from home or because of status offenses such as school truancy. Finally, she notes youth’s fear of reprisal from corrections staff, peers, and judges is one of many reasons why they may not disclose their sexual orientation or gender identity.

In another study, Kathryn Himmelstein and Hannah Bruckner (2011) utilized the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, a nationally representative, population-based sample, to demonstrate that nonheterosexual adolescents, particularly girls, are disproportionately sanctioned by schools and criminal justice authorities, despite the fact that they are not engaging in more law-breaking or transgressive behavior than their heterosexual peers, adding nuance to our understanding of schools as sites of hostility and pushout for LGBTQ youth.

These studies are important from a social epidemiological standpoint, but they have not addressed the perspectives of the young people themselves. Moreover, no study has looked specifically at the experiences of queer and trans young people who have been incarcerated in girls’ detention facilities, specifically. This study seeks to build upon and expand these findings by using qualitative research to cast light upon the nuances of identity and lived experiences of LGBTQ youth and young adults who were previously incarcerated in the juvenile justice system in New York State.

Method

Community-Based Participatory Research (CBPR) and Critical Ethnography

This research aimed to enhance our understanding of the reasons for the disproportionate representation of LGBTQ youth within girls’ detention facilities in the juvenile justice system in New York and to shed light upon the experiences they have within them. Specifically, the research questions posed are (1) How do LGBTQ young adults who have been incarcerated in girls’ detention facilities in New York define, understand, and negotiate the contours of their gender identity and sexual orientation in relation to age, race and ethnicity, and other aspects of identity; and, relatedly, how do they narrate identity “turning points?” (2) What are the pathways into and out of the juvenile justice system for participants and how do these pathways intersect with other social service systems such as child welfare services? (3) How do participants understand and narrate their experiences within detention facilities in the juvenile justice system?

Critical ethnographic and CBPR methods were drawn upon in order to address the large-scale injustices and violations experienced by these young people. These methods were particularly appropriate because of their embeddedness in critical social justice and postcolonial and feminist theories and for their utility in exploratory research that aims to uncover subjugated knowledge and illuminate relatively unexplored phenomena. D. Soyini Madison (2005) argues that critical ethnography “begins with an ethical responsibility to address processes of unfairness or injustice within a particular lived domain,” in which the critical ethnographer resists domestication and

“takes us beneath surface appearances, disrupts the status quo, and unsettles both neutrality and taken-for-granted assumptions by bringing to light underlying and obscure operations of power and control” in an effort to move “from ‘what is’ to ‘what could be.’” (p. 5)

She goes on to argue that an indispensable component of what some have termed the “new” or postcritical ethnography is a mapping of the explicitly political aims of critical ethnography onto researcher reflexivity, so that researchers’ reflection upon their own positionality aims to “reflect upon its own power, position, choices, and effects … thereby making it accessible, transparent, and vulnerable to judgment and evaluation” and in so doing “inviting an ethics of accountability” (p. 8).

Situating Myself Within the Research

I came to this work after having been a social worker in the child welfare system in New York City in a program with congregate care foster homes for LGBTQ youth. I left my work in direct practice in New York and moved to Seattle to begin my PhD in social work in 2006. Having witnessed massive systemic abuses against LGBTQ youth as a social worker informed the course of the research. While I was in school, I maintained relationships with my former colleagues and many of the young people, some of whom I continue to mentor. It was from conversations with my former colleagues and supervisor, as well as ongoing communication with a former foster youth and members of the youth advocacy community, that this research materialized and took shape.

In everything I do, I try to be attuned to the dynamic roles that my identities play in informing my movement through the world. I approached this research with a spirit of cultural humility or an understanding that there is no end point one arrives at in becoming a more conscious person but rather that it is lifelong work that one commits to (Tervalon & Murray-Garcia, 1998). I am insider–outsider to this research as a gender-normative queer white adult woman. I was myself a queer youth and—though never having been systems involved—had to be mindful of not imposing my own experiences and ideas about being young and queer upon research participants’ narratives. In this spirit, I want to emphasize the role that I feel my race, class, gender, and sexuality played in the interviews. Given the extent to which whiteness and class privilege continue to be centered in queer and trans communities, I was particularly aware of my symbolic presence as a white researcher of middle-class upbringing interviewing participants who identified predominantly as people of color from lower socioeconomic backgrounds (Cohen, 1997; Kumashiro, 2001). Cognizant of research legacies within communities of color as well as the fact that we continue to live in a white supremacist culture, I tried early on in the interviews to name the historical legacies and contemporary context in which our relationship and conversation were taking place and the ways in which this might inform our interpersonal dynamics. I recognized the possibility that my whiteness could be triggering for participants, particularly given that I was asking questions about racial identity and experiences of racism. Similarly, when relevant, I tried to explicitly name the ways in which my cisgender privilege may have made it difficult for transgender and gender nonconforming participants to talk about experiences of transphobia.

Community Advisory Board (CAB)

Consistent with principles of CBPR, a CAB was assembled, whose role was strongly collaborative. Rogerio Pinto, Spector, and Valera (2011) have noted that CABs have their origins in LGBTQ community activism and arose from queer activists’ response to the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV)/acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS) epidemic. The CAB was created specifically for this study and was composed of a juvenile justice policy advocate, two child welfare practitioners, another researcher, and two previously systems involved young queer and/or transgender-identified adults. The CAB was multiracial, multiethnic, and multigenerational, and participants represented a range of gender identities and sexual orientations. The CAB met on a bimonthly basis during the preliminary stages of designing and planning for the research and on a monthly basis while the research was being carried out. Grounded in a truly collaborative and participatory spirit among all members, the CAB engaged in more traditional functions of informing study design and materials, facilitating participant recruitment, and facilitating the application and dissemination of findings as well as more nontraditional roles in research such as aiding in the interpretation of interview findings and hosting a community forum. Additionally, the CAB was helpful in less formal ways like locating meeting space and suggesting other potential avenues for mobilizing support for the project.

Life History Interviewing

The study received institutional human subjects’ approval, and all participants were asked to complete an informed consent form. Recruitment of participants took place through flyers and word of mouth at various LGBTQ youth–serving social service agencies and community-based organizations, activist groups, LGBTQ campus centers, and Internet-based LISTSERVs. Interviews were conducted in public places within participants’ communities, such as public libraries and coffee shops. Once the interviews began, some participants referred peers to the study. Life history interviews were conducted with 10 gay/trans/queer/same-sex practicing young adults between the ages of 18 and 25 who had experiences of incarceration in girls’ juvenile justice facilities in New York. All participants are identified as black, Latino, or multiracial. Notably, participants used a vast array of nuanced categories in identifying their sexual orientation and gender identity, including aggressive (AG), femme AG, stud, boi, lesbian, trans woman, genderqueer, bisexual, gay, and femme, among other identities. It is also worth noting that many participants described identities that were fluid over time. Life history interviewing involves dialogical interactive connections being made between people, as the interviewer and storyteller collaborate and produce the story together (Ghorashi, 2008). Life history interviewing allowed for a narrated panorama of young people’s lives that elucidated pathways prior to and following incarceration as well as allowing participants to delve richly into questions of how they negotiate their sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, and race in relation to various contexts, relationships, and systems, over time. Participants were asked to generate a code to be assigned to their transcript based upon their favorite color and the month and day of their birthday. In reporting findings, the researcher assigned a pseudonym to participants and made efforts to remove potentially identifying information. Interviews were audio recorded and transcribed verbatim. Participants were invited to review the transcripts of their interviews and to provide feedback. Approximately half of the participants elected to receive copies of their transcripts. Of those participants who viewed their transcripts, none elected to change or alter any portion of the transcript, and minimal feedback was provided to the researcher, other than to note approval. Additionally, all participants were invited to attend a community forum that was hosted to present findings to the community, and three participants attended.

The Listening Guide

The highly embodied nature of the research endeavor at hand demanded a nonlinear, relational approach to reading gendered and cultured experiences that seek expression in voice but ultimately reside in the body. Hudson (2012, p. 176) has noted that “considering the complex geographies of the lived experience and the spatialized knowledge generated by the body creates opportunities for liberatory social welfare research.” Congruent with this orientation of bringing the body into research, interview data were analyzed using the Listening Guide (Gilligan, Spencer, Weinberg, & Bertsch, 2003). Conceptualized through Carol Gilligan’s early work on identity and moral development, the Listening Guide is a relational method that takes into consideration the multiplicity of voice when analyzing and interpreting qualitative interview data. Grounded in psychoanalytic theory, the Listening Guide “draws on voice, resonance, and relationship as ports of entry into the human psyche” (p. 157) and consists of a series of steps that are intended to systematically interpret the many layers of voice contained within a person’s expressed experience.

The Listening Guide method of analysis consists of four sequential steps or listenings—referred to as such because they require active participation on the part of the listener. The listenings are interdependent and based on the assumption that the voice, like the psyche, is contrapuntal, so that many voices are occurring at once; it is the charge of the researcher to weave them into synchronicity in order to make meaning of the narrators’ experience. Much like more traditional practices of coding qualitative data, such as those of grounded theory, theorizing and understanding the voices contained within the interview transcript is an iterative process, in which the voices—which may be defined and understood over the course of several interviews—are analogous to the themes generated through axial coding (Strauss & Corbin, 1998). During each listening, the author underlined and noted themes in a different color, so that the final coded transcript was a visual representation of the various stages of listening for voice and coconstructing meaning with the participants’ narrative.

The first listening is comprised of two parts: (a) listening for the plots and (b) the listener’s response to the interview. During this plot listening, the researcher brings their own subjectivity into the interpretive process by noting their own social location in relation to the narrator and their emotional responses to the listening. During the second listening, the researcher hones in on the voice of the “I” in the narration by creating an “I Poem.” This stage is twofold and is intended both to introduce the researcher to the distinctive cadences and rhythms of the narrator’s first person voice and to hear how this person speaks about herself. In the third listening, the analysis is brought back into relationship with the research questions as the researcher listens for contrapuntal voices. In the final listening, an analysis of the narrator in relation to the research question is composed based upon the previous listenings. This final analysis is a composite narrative written by the researcher based upon the sequence of listenings.

Results

Results of this study were clustered into four main categories: (1) identities and pathways into the system; (2) schools as hostile environments; (3) state-sanctioned violence; and (4) resilience, activism, and healing. The first two themes are the subject of a separate article, “Pathways and Pipelines: LGBTQ Youth’s Trajectories Into Girls’ Juvenile Justice Facilities.” Within this article, I explore the second two categories of themes: specifically, participants’ narration of community-based interactions with law enforcement, as well as experiences within girls’ detention facilities in the juvenile justice system in New York, and finally factors contributing to participants’ personal and collective resiliency and healing.

State-Sanctioned Violence

Given the continuous strand of state-sanctioned violence represented in both “stop and frisk” policies and via the permission of youth restraint within the juvenile justice system, it is not surprising that they both emerged as mechanisms of surveillance and violence by which gender and sexuality are regulated. Three subthemes emerged within the overarching category of state-sanctioned violence: (1) community-level profiling and criminalization; (2) excessive use of force within detention facilities; and (3) untangling the complicated relationship between trauma, detention, sexual orientation, and gender identity.

“I Do Not Consent to This Search!”: Community-Level Profiling—Criminalization and Survival at the Intersection of Identities

Bourdieu and Wacquant (1992) conceptualized symbolic power while striving to understand the role played by social status in maintaining hierarchy within capitalist systems. Symbolic power accounts for discipline used against another to reinforce that individual’s status within a hierarchy, most commonly within the context of a system or institutions. Symbolic violence which he characterized as “soft violence” is enacted when holders of symbolic power exploit their role or status within a social hierarchy. Unlike physical violence, it is not explicit and not necessarily conscious though it may be embedded in physical forms of violence. Bourdieu further asserted that symbolic violence is often overlooked in social theory and misrecognized in everyday life. This misrecognition allows symbolic violence to seep into dominant discourses as they are spoken and as they are enacted on bodies (Bordieu & Wacquant, 1992). The body becomes the site of this violence, for example, via state-sanctioned forms of violence such as those permitted under policies like stop and frisk and the permitted, largely unmonitored use of restraint within correctional facilities.

The themes of bodily surveillance and bodily freedom were recurrent throughout the interviews. A framework of symbolic power and symbolic violence is useful in understanding the embodied ways, in which power was wielded over participants by law enforcement and correctional officers. In Queer (In)Justice, Mogul, Ritchie, and Whitlock (2011) highlight the ways in which the criminal legal system polices gender presentation, while failing to acknowledge the ways in which gender nonconforming queer people are disproportionately targeted by law enforcement and as targets of violent crimes:

Law enforcement officers have fairly consistently and explicitly policed the borders of the gender binary. Historically and up until the 1980’s, such policing took the form of enforcement of sumptuary laws, which required individuals to wear at least three articles of clothing conventionally associated with the gender they were assigned at birth, and subjected people to arrest for impersonating another gender. They contributed to the development of archetypes of gender transgressive people as inherently criminal, and continue to act as unwritten rules, which, when violated, signal disorder and fraud to law enforcement. (pp. 64–65)

Echoes of sumptuary laws presented themselves in the testimonies of several participants who recall their experiences of targeted provocation and violence within the community via stop and frisk. For example, in describing her community-based experiences of being stopped by the police, Darnetta describes in explicit detail intersecting features of her identities and their intersection with space and place that she feels resulted in her being stopped in the West Village, near Christopher Street:

I did not consent to this search. My pants is right here, so he’s putting his hands right here. You’re all in my f-ing crotch area and we’re on Christopher Street … and you’re sitting here doing this for no apparent reason, just because I’m black, I’m a dyke, and it’s Thursday night. It’s TNT. Like I don’t have time for your quotas. It was like the beginning of the month, so like his quota for last month was low, so he just told his partner to get some. I don’t know, twice, twice within a three block difference. One next to Papaya’s and then one next to the jewelry store there right by the karaoke bar, right there. What are you doing there? What are you stopping me for?

Toni, who identifies her sexual orientation as AG lesbian and stud and her gender identity as female, also described experiences in which she felt she was being profiled by law enforcement for her combined sexual orientation, gender presentation, and race. When asked the questions “What do your identities mean together? What does it mean to be black and a stud and a female?” Toni responded,

It means that if I got a doo rag on and some Tims and a hoodie, I’ll get searched if I walk around New York City and I’m walking in the wrong area—which is not a crime. I’ve gotten stopped and frisked they think I’m a guy.

Alethia is a 19-year-old woman who identifies primarily as AG. She described the almost daily experience of street harassment when out in public with her girlfriend during which they were commonly propositioned. Alethia described a shift in the tone of the harassment, which became more AG and homophobic on occasions when she chose to assert the fact that she and her girlfriend were a couple. Alethia also described experiences of harassment and homophobia when she was alone in public and asserted her sexual orientation and disinterest:

I’ll be walking in a street and like a guy will find me attractive and he’ll say something nice, like, “Oh, you’re beautiful,” and I’ll say, “Thank you,” because regardless of what, it’s like, you know, a compliment. Fine. And he’ll be like, “Oh, do you have a boyfriend?” And I’ll be like, “No, you know, I’m taken, but I have a woman.” And then it’s just like, “Oh, but why you like girls? And what made you get into that? And why you dress like that?” … I just walk away … Yeah, and then when—some of them like the disrespectful ones, “Dyke bitch,” or, “Oh, you butch,” or, “Oh, like I hope you’re raped.”

On some occasions, the street harassment became physical, and Alethia would move to physically defend herself and her girlfriend. On one such occasion, she was arrested after pulling a knife on a man who physically groped her girlfriend while they were walking down the street. Alethia describes this incident that led to her arrest:

And I was telling you about the time when I was walking with my girlfriend, after the guy had, you know, touched her behind or whatever, I got upset, and I pulled out a knife on him. Now he ran into the building, into some building, and it had double doors. So one you can open to walk into the building, but the other one, you need like a key, like you live there. So I couldn’t get in, so I walked her to the train station …. When I walked back, I seen like 31 cops …. I wanted to look to see who was in the building, to see if they caught him. I thought they had grabbed him because some lady that asked me what happened, but she seen the knife in my hand. Come to find out, she was the one who called the cops and reported me instead of reporting him …. Some lady that came out when she heard the commotion with me because I was yelling at him. And he was gone, and the cops, she pointed me out, and I got arrested. The first charge was attempted murder, but I didn’t touch him or nothing. So they dropped it down to possession of a weapon. I stayed in the bookings. That was worse. That was the first time I ever got arrested.

The dynamics present in the harassment that resulted in Alethia’s efforts to defend her and her girlfriend were replicated in her interactions with law enforcement:

Yeah, but even the cop, the cop who arrested me, he was real nasty too. Yeah, because he was like, “Oh, why would you try to stab him? You know, even if he made a funny comment,” I was like, “Yeah, but he touched my girlfriend.” He’s like, “Yeah, but can you pick him out?” I’m like, “He’s not even around.” And he was like, “You shouldn’t even be dressing like that.” And I was like—and his partner, which was a girl, was telling him like, you know, “Stop with the comments,” … he was like, “You want to act like a man and dress like a man? I’ll teach you what it means to be with a man.” And that’s when his partner was like, you know, “Seriously,” I forgot what was his last name, but she called him by his last name, she was like, “Stop.”

Acting in self-defense when faced with street harassment appeared to place some participants at increased risk for interfacing with law enforcement, and then interfacing with law enforcement commonly led to gross abuses of power.

“They Used to Call It the Red Freckle of Death:” Excessive Use of Force in Juvenile Justice Facilities

Participants’ descriptions of life inside, and relations between residents and staff within girls’ detention facilities, painted a portrait that was far from a rehabilitative environment. The theme of guards’ excessive use of force within correctional facilities was alarmingly present across interviews, and many participants gave graphic accounts either of their own experiences of being physically restrained or of witnessing the restraint of others. Most participants shared a similar analysis of the abusive power dynamics that characterized this method of violent discipline. This analysis centered the combined gender, age, and size differential between the mostly male adult guards and the youth inmates:

There was just some kids up there that just did not belong up there at all, like confused as to why they was even up there. You know what I’m saying? And I felt like New York State turned that into a way of revenue and they abused its power like seriously. I mean, I done seen girls go through the hospital over a restraint. I went to a hospital for a few restraints, talking about where they had to get a stitch or something. Like that’s just ridiculous. You should not be throwing young women like that on the floor like that (Tasha).

Some participants also spoke to youth health and medical issues that arose and/or were ignored or made worse by the violent restraints. Nashan, who suffers from epilepsy, describes the drawn-out process of recovering from being physically restrained while in detention:

Sometimes I was being restrained and I’d catch a seizure. Or sometimes they’d restrain me and they’d throw me inside the isolation room, and I’d fall down and have a seizure. But somebody would always be there because they knew that if they restrained me and I got too excited, that would follow right after. So it wasn’t like they weren’t prepared for this shit, but they knew what they were doing at the same time, they just didn’t care … I learned my lesson at OCFS when it came to my health. So I would be sitting there, shackled on the bed. And the reason why I say it was uncomfortable is because after having a fucking epileptic episode, like come on. That shit hurts … And it’s like now I have to be stuck in this one position where I can’t move my back, I can’t move my body. Not only the pain from my seizure, but pain from the restraint. When they take you down, they take you down. Some of these men that take you down is 200+, 6 foot, mad stocky, built. And they’re throwing all their weight on you, like boom. And you’re, man, little. Like you’re young. You got to think that some of these kids aren’t even 5′2. Like you got this 6′5 man just throwing his whole weight on your body. It used to be so bad that every time I used to get a restraint, I would pop blood vessels in my face because that’s how heavy they were leaning on your top part. And you’re screaming like, “Get off of me.” They used to call them the red freckle of death because it wasn’t just me, it was a few of us.

Several participants spoke to retaliation by correctional staff toward queer or same-sex practicing youth in girls’ detention facilities as being informed by gender identity and presentation. Notably, it was reported by participants across gender spectrums that AG, butch, stud, and other young people whose identities and presentation represented masculine femininities were subject to increased violence, mostly through the permitted practice of restraining inmates, but also via verbal shaming and abuse. More feminine presenting lesbians and bisexual women, according to participants, were likely to get hit on by guards. Nashan explains:

“Oh, you want to be like a man? You want to be a man? Eat this. Eat it.” Boom and every time they’d throw me on the floor, I’d eat that. “Keep going, you’re not hurting me.” “I don’t care” Every female breaks.” And I used to tell them “I’m not like every other female. I’m not going to break. There’s nothing you going to sit here and do to make me break to make you feel that I am more of a woman just to satisfy your fucking ego.” That used to be my problem with them up there. I don’t give a fuck how many times you throw me on the floor, how rough you throw me on the floor, it doesn’t matter. I’m never going to break and sit here and tell you just so you can feel better. Like you getting off on this? This is my whole thing. Like get off of me. And no females ever restrained me, only males.

Later in the interview, Nashan described their observation of the ways that more feminine presenting queer women were treated by guards:

The femmes, the female identified as lesbians were the ones that got hit on the most, though … Because they felt that—the men felt that they could turn them straight. Upstate, it was like the aggressive women they felt like they had to verbally abuse us to try to get us to go straight. And with the femme women, the lipstick lesbians, it was, “I’ll dick you down to turn you straight.”

Tasha also describes having bones broken and needing to be hospitalized during some of her many experiences of being restrained:

And when they restrained me, they always restrained me hard. I had a broken arm, a broken leg. (Interviewer: You had to go to the hospital? And did the people at the hospital say, “What’s going on?”) They asked what happened and I told them I got restrained. They said, “What type of restraints have these people been doing to have you girls come in here like this?” I said, “This is how they restrain us. They take our arms, they swing them this way … and they put their knee in our back and their hand, their free hand, on our heads. So we’re on the concrete and they’re moving their hand, we’re getting scratched up and hurt. And we’re being handled as if we were men.

I asked Tasha if she knew if anyone at the hospital had ever tried to report the number of restraint-related injuries they saw at the hospital, and she responded

If they report it, what’s really going to happen? Why try to do something? They had a conference about girls’ facilities, and a couple of them got shut down. But the ones with the most problems never got shut down.

Participants shared stories about the consequences for challenging policy or reporting abuses, which commonly took the form of isolation, having time added to your stay, having other inmates turned against you by staff, being known as a “snitch,” and various other forms of retaliation. Others discussed the ineffectiveness of formal, institutionalized processes for actually filing a complaint. As Nashan put it, “If you opened your mouth you’re going down.”

“That’s a Sad Stereotype:” Untangling the Complicated Relationship Between Trauma, Detention, and Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity

Notably, several of the participants reported complex trauma histories that were compounded by the trauma they experienced while incarcerated. Pasko (2010) writes about the subtle and explicit ways that sexuality is regulated within girls’ juvenile detention centers based upon 55 interviews with current juvenile justice professionals from seven detention facilities in the Western United States. Over three fourths of the interviewees identified LBQ sexuality as being connected to a history of sexual abuse. Several interviewees advocated for “treating” sexual behavior through behavioral modification therapy and medication. Within the current study, the vast majority of the participants identified their sexual orientation or gender identity as being causally unrelated to experiences of childhood sexual abuse. Notably, some indicated that they felt that it was a commonly held misperception that queer, transgender, and gender nonconforming young people’s sexual orientation and gender identity result from experiences of childhood sexual abuse. Nashan—whose preferred gender pronoun is they—describes feeling like both their sexual orientation and sexual abuse history were pathologized by correctional facility staff who assumed that their attraction to women, lesbian identity, and gender presentation must be the result of having been sexually abused. Nashan described this as especially painful given their belief that they were sexually assaulted on at least one occasion because they were a masculine-presenting lesbian:

They need a serious support system for LGBTQ identified young folks. And I think that they need to make a special curriculum for the staff to take to deal with LGBTQ identified folks, especially if they are LGBTQ identified and they have a history of abuse, chronic abuse, because it’s not even a point. You may not be the person that’s hurting them or hurt them in the past or something of that nature, but because you don’t know, you don’t know how to deal or say certain things, like certain things are triggers, you know? … Or it’s because you were raped that you’re gay. That was a serious trigger. That’s a sad stereotype.

Nashan also described the ways in which the structure and daily operations of juvenile detention facilities in fact triggered memories related to previously experienced child sexual abuse. In the excerpt below, they detail the ways in which they attempted to negotiate showering while in detention after having survived a previous experience of corrective rape within a group home:

Well, being a rape victim at that time, it was like very hard for me to acknowledge the fact that I couldn’t do things on my own or leave out with free will and all of those particular things. And due to the fact that you’re being locked up, it’s predominantly male, so I had trust issues with that. Like their whole shower arrangement was a problem for me … like a staff had to be right next to the bathroom … you had to prepare for your shower in your room.

Resilience and Survival

Participants within this study identified several factors contributing to personal resiliency, including some specific to New York City and to the communities in which they participate. Specifically three themes emerged: 1) managing and performing gender, 2) healing environments and communities, and 3) the importance of mentorship.

“Hmm … Let Me Try Dressing Like a Girl:” Managing and Performing Gender

In Methodology of the Oppressed, Chela Sandoval (2000) introduces the metaphor of a “stick shift,” used to refer to the topography of consciousness in opposition, “oppositional ideological forms,” or “modes” drawn upon, utilized, performed by subordinated people and communities in resistance to domination. Within Sandoval’s framework, the fifth gear, “differential consciousness,” “permits the driver to select, engage and disengage gears in a system for the transmission of power” (p. 57). Functioning in and through social, cultural, and political hierarchies, locations, and systems of value, the chosen position of the clutch at any moment is a strategic and tactical decision with regard to access and survival (Sandoval, 2000). In the case of many participants, within a larger context of navigating racialized gender roles and restrictions and of antiqueer and antitransgender sentiment, interstitial spaces and identities were skillfully navigated, deployed, and performed as a survival strategy. Some participants narrated the ways that they had learned to make strategic use of gender presentation in order to negotiate the terms of their juvenile justice involvement and their safety in the world more generally. This would not have been an option were there not differential treatment and consequences at various stages of the juvenile justice system involvement for youth who presented differently in terms of sexual orientation and gender identity, yet another example of structural and symbolic violence. Tasha describes how she eventually learned to “girl it up” or present more femininely during her court dates in order to avoid being remanded:

It took me a while to figure it out because my judge never really said anything, so I had to learn. See, growing up liking girls, I’d never been around prejudice. Like I could walk down the street with my girlfriend, holding her hand without a problem. But going to lockup, it was a whole different story because they didn’t like it and there was nothing anybody could say or do. It was just something that was not liked. It was like—so when I went to court for the first time dressed as a boy, I had my hair braided back. My hair was down to here. It was braided back and that’s how I felt that day. I just felt like doing that. And I got remanded. And when I noticed I got remanded four times in a row without him even looking at my case, nor saying anything about it, I was like, “Hmm, let me try dressing like a girl.” So I went and got my hair—I took my hair out of the braids, curled it up, put on my nice little girly outfit, and I didn’t get remanded. And he actually talked about my case. So when I did it again, I’m like, “Hmm, I see.”

Strategic use of gender presentation for survival and safety extended to situations and circumstances beyond the juvenile justice system. Some participants described strategic gender presentation as a form of resistance and a means of negotiating survival within various neighborhoods and communities. In these cases, gender presentation was a means of deflecting undesired male attention, sexual harassment, and catcalling on the street. Strategic negotiation of gender presentation was also a tool utilized in the course of interactions with law enforcement during instances of profiling. Toni describes her feelings about unsolicited male attention in the neighborhood where she lives and grew up:

OK, yeah. I’m a girl whatever—but I guess I dress like a guy so guys don’t come at me. I got a body—like it’s kind of feminine like—you know—if I was to wear like a tight shirt, it would be right on my body. I’m not nervous, but I don’t want to be walking down the street like “yo ma.” Oh no no. Like chill n-. Who wants to be saying “no, no, no” like all day.

Nashan describes negotiating gender presentation during three experiences of being pulled aside by law enforcement on the street over a 1-month period:

They’re reading me as a man. Each time they’re reading me as a man. “Excuse me, sir.” And I’d be ignoring them because they’re not talking to me. Because at the end of the day, I know I may identify as a woman, you identify me as a man if you the cop. I’m going to keep walking. He was like “Sir.” I’m like, “I’m not a sir, so obviously you can’t be looking for me. Am I free to go?”

“When I Vogue … I Feel Comfortable … Accepted” Healing Environments and Communities

Participants described many different forms of healing and commitments to their communities. Many were engaged in activism and expressed a desire to create change, so that the next generation of LGBTQ youth would not have the same experiences they had with the juvenile justice system in school and in foster care. Some were actively engaged with youth organizing groups whose missions were to end street harassment for LGBTQ youth and to engage in policy change work. Others were doing internships at LGBTQ youth–serving organizations. A handful of participants were involved in New York City (NYC’s) Ball Scene, a performance community consisting of largely queer and transgender people of color, best known as the origins of voguing. Central to all of these forms of personal resiliency is their embeddedness in an ethic of cultural work or performance.

Nashan is involved with several activist groups and experiences their activist communities as their family and primary source of support. They describe their activist involvement over time:

I first became involved in activism at 16 years old. This is when (activist attorney) was working with me very close in (multi-issue advocacy organization). And I was doing volunteer work for them in working with youth communications, so that’s where my first I would say step towards activism started. Started telling my story to represent … so I went to Albany and spoke to the legislators then and everything like, the assemblymen and women and congress and all that stuff. That was a big thing for me … I’ve been in activism heavy ever since … (mentions QPOC youth organizing group) … anything when it comes to that. And I’m just growing more and more into the activism culture from the radical beliefs to the radical politics. And I’m just like trying to find my total comfortability of where I want to be in activism now because I know that’s my total calling and passion.

In his ethnographic study of the ballroom community in Detroit, Marlon Bailey (2009) explicates the power of collective performance and its utility in a variety of social justice undertakings. Bailey notes that while recognized by some community-based organizations, performance has not been embraced in earnest by public health and has scarcely been deployed as a method or object of study within research on HIV/AIDS prevention and treatment, despite its innovative potential as a generator of transformative spaces and possibilities. Scholars in multiple arenas have written about the highly embodied nature of queer and transgender people’s identity, oppression, and survival and the ways in which we manage and transform stigmatized identities and less valued lives. Scholars of HIV and AIDS prevention have argued that the ballroom community is one of the primary means by which urban black and Latina/Latino queer and transgender communities create and engage in HIV prevention strategies. Other functions of the ballroom scene include affirming and supporting queer and transgender youth of color’s same-sex attraction and desire and providing home, community, and family or kinship networks (Arnold & Bailey, 2009). Participants cited involvement with the ballroom community as fulfilling many different kinds of needs in their lives.

Crystal, a 21-year-old transgender woman, explains the importance of her involvement in the ball scene:

Wow, the ball scene has played a big role in my life … I actually learned how to be the person I was and not hide who I was. And that always felt good that, you know, you can go to a place and become flamboyant as soon as you walk through the door, or become a superstar or someone who you’re not in the real world. It’s like an actual world. It’s like the stuff you can’t do here, you’re most definite to do it in the Kiki scene or the real scene, ballroom scene. When I vogue, I’m in an environment with a whole bunch of people just like me and I feel comfortable, I feel accepted. What’s another word? Rejuvenated.

Jasmine, who identifies as a femme AG lesbian and who is not out to her immediate family, describes the ballroom scene as a place where she could forge kinship and experience family in ways that centered and tended to her experiences as a young lesbian in the world:

I have a gay mother and a gay father, and that’s also my family. So in a sense, I have two families. My gay father is 30 and my gay mother is 22, and I met them through ballroom. I asked my gay mother and my gay father asked me. And it was just like we just formed the relationship in the ballroom scene and they were just definitely people who helped me like find identity in the ballroom scene and just figure out what I wanted to do, and just people who I looked up to and could talk to, and we just formed that bond … I talk to my gay parents about a lot of the same things that I talk about with my real parents, minus the ballroom and the gay stuff. We talk about anything and everything, and it’s just like they help me through life and they’re older than me, so they’ve been through a lot of the things that I’m going through right now. So it’s kind of similar.

“Everybody Needs That. They Need Somebody in Their Life That’s Gonna Be Like You Alright, “You Gonna Get Through This”: The Importance of Mentorship

Having adult mentors emerged as a particularly important aspect of resilience in the face of navigating abusive systems and their aftermath. Participants named therapists, caseworkers, legal advocates, sympathetic line staff, gay kin, teachers, community activists, artists, and others as indispensable people throughout their lives. Mentors served the functions of helping participants to externalize experiences of abuse and oppression, assisting in navigating systemic bureaucracies and apathy, reflecting participants’ persistent humanity back to them, and connecting participants to community-based resources in the absence of adequate reentry services and with the added burden of negotiating life with “a record.” Mentors also served the important function of being a consistent adult presence to listen, bear witness, guide, and extend care. Nashan who had been kicked out by their adoptive mother for being gay describes their relationship with a therapist in a detention facility:

She’s like the main reason why I totally got involved, actually with the whole Psychology and law situation, like because she realized I needed out from—my counselor, she was a doctor. I cannot remember her name. I can’t remember her name for the life of me. But she was there throughout the whole time for my individual—just the one woman we could see once a week. And she realized that this was too much for me, me being locked up was too much for me. I was facing too many different issues at once and too many problems going on with my life at once. For me to have really been in that particular situation, she felt that place wasn’t therapeutic for me at all. She felt that it wasn’t going to do anything but out me into a more rebellious stage. Like we had a very open-ended relationship when it came to a client and, you know, doctor. And she gave me my first psychology textbook, Psychology 101. And I read that from front to back … she felt like the psychology would be great for me to start right there, and that’s what made me want to take my GED, go to college.

Monica, who had recently aged out of foster care after being in numerous foster family, residential treatment center, and kinship care placements from the age of 2, is living on her own in an apartment for the first time and looking for work in the midst of a recession and with a record. She notes the importance of not only mentorship but connectedness more generally, as she struggles with what sometimes feels like insurmountable adversity:

I don’t feel like nobody should go through anything alone. So you should always have one person who—you knew—agrees with everything you do, that makes you happy … that’s there, that supports you. Everybody needs at least one person in their life to support them. I don’t thinking anybody should go through stuff alone—just have nobody. When you have an adult or older person that—you know—make you feel so good about everything you do, and pushes you, and motivates, there ain’t no stopping you …. EVERYBODY needs that. They need somebody in their life that’s gonna be like you alright, “you gonna get through this.”

Justice noted that she wishes she’d had the mentorship she currently has in her life when she was younger. After going through the juvenile justice system and having a brief experience within the adult prison system, she decided to get her general equivalency diploma, began an internship, and became involved in community organizing. She describes how empowering it feels for her to work with queer activist attorneys who are committed to ending police harassment of LGBTQ youth and young adults of color:

She teaches us about the law. She teaches us about our rights with police and how to go about certain situations. Like stuff that people wouldn’t know that they should know, like we exercise our right to remain silent and do not consent to searches and, you know, stuff like that. And like she really teaches us about charges, like, okay, if you’re being charged with this, they got to have, you know, a certain amount of evidence or they have to prove this. And if you know in your mind that they can’t prove it, don’t plead to it. You know, just wait it out, go to court as long as you have to go. Like she just gives us skills to prevent—skills so that we know our rights.

Discussion

Jasbir Puar (2012) has noted that contemporary discourses around queer youth are neoliberal and reproduce problematic assumptions not only about race, class, and gender but also about bodily health, debility, and capacity. She interrogates, for example, the framing of gay youth suicide as exceptional and of greater importance than Lauren Berlant’s (2007) notion of slow death, which Puar describes as “the debilitating ongoingness of structural inequality and suffering” (p. 149). She argues:

For instance, how do queer girls commit suicide? What of the slow deaths of teenage girls through anorexia, bulimia, and numerous sexual assaults they endure as punishment for the transgressing of proper femininity and alas, even for conforming to it? (p. 157)

The concept of slow death is reminiscent of Bourdieu and Wacquant (1992) conceptualization of symbolic violence. In this case, the messaging embedded in discourse and conveyed via young people’s socialization processes and interactions with society gets violently enacted upon the body in ways that may not be immediately recognizable because they are symbolic or soft. Participants’ narratives speak to the urgency of expanding discourses about the experiences of LGBTQ youth in order to center youth’s own articulation of their experiences as well as the need for more nuanced analysis to circumvent the hierarchization of experience and reproduction of other axes of privilege. For example, it is clear from participants’ testimonies that the intersections of race, class, age, gender, gender identity, and sexual orientation inform the likelihood that LGBTQ young people will interface with the juvenile justice system.

In March 2012, Governor Cuomo and the state legislature enacted the Close to Home Initiative through the New York State budget. As its name suggests, the initiative proposed a continued decline in the use of upstate facilities for NYC youth and the use of New York City–run youth prison facilities, community-based alternatives to detention, or juvenile probation as an alternative to sending youth to state-run facilities hours north, where it was difficult for family members to visit and where mounting reports (federal, state, and individual) regarding excessive use of force in facilities were raising critical questions regarding whether placing youth in settings that put them at increased exposure to violence and trauma was in fact helpful to anyone (Correctional Association, 2012). This question is particularly relevant given all we know about the extent to which the lives of juvenile justice–involved youth have likely been characterized by previous trauma and violence and massive, often multiple, forms of discrimination (Majd, Marksemer, & Reyes, 2009). Participants’ narratives provided needed insight into the often invisibilized unique trauma histories of LGBTQ youth within girls’ facilities in the juvenile justice system as well as information regarding possible reasons for their overrepresentation within these systems. Moreover, the narratives provide critical information to our growing understanding of LGBTQ young people’s unique experience of the sexual abuse to prison pipeline and to the swelling call for trauma-informed practice and policy (Saar, Epstein, Rosenthal, & Vafa, 2015). Specifically, participants’ narratives illuminated the need to understand the many manifestations of state-sanctioned violence in their lives as trauma in and of themselves and as oil slickening the pipeline.