This is part 4 of the occasional series, Before the Record: The Pipelines, which examines the policies and practices that criminalize girls
Mea was 15 years old, but she didn’t look like it. They called her “redbone,” referring to the hue of her skin and sandy-colored hair. She developed early, and every man who crossed her mother’s threshold noticed.
Like most girls who end up before a judge, Mea experienced violence and abuse. Girls’ pathways into the justice system run through victimization, not around it, researchers have found.
A dataset from Loyola University’s Modern Slavery Research Project, confirms this with brutal precision: 100% of girls who engaged in criminalized survival behaviors had prior histories of victimization.
Every single one.
That same dataset also found that nearly 90% had experienced systemic neglect — institutional failure across schools, child welfare, and family systems combined. For many of the young women, like Mea, the failures started at home.
Mea is from Newark, New Jersey, where I taught for nine years. But there are many Meas walking the streets of New Orleans, Baton Rouge, Shreveport, and Lake Charles — young girls trying to survive abuse, within their homes and within society at large.
Coming from The Bricks, Newark’s public housing, Mea carried the weight of the world on her shoulders before she was old enough to understand the heaviness or its lasting impact.
Some girls on the block hated her out of envy. The older ladies on the stoop made comments when she walked past from the bus stop. She got looks from men, young and old — mostly Jahim, her mother’s boyfriend. Mea’s mother said he was the love of her life. But for four years, while his girlfriend was asleep, Jahim had been coming into her daughter’s room.
When Mea told her mother, her mother called her a liar. Accused her of making passes at him. Her mother confronted Jahim and he denied everything. Said he never touched her.
And just like that, Mea found herself expelled from home. She, too, found herself wondering if all of this was her fault. But her grandmother took Mea in, kept her off the streets, and knew — the way grandmothers know — that her granddaughter was telling the truth. That is what every child needs to survive: one caring adult. Because she had her grandmother’s love, she has a fighting chance to get through her struggles. But first, every institution designed to “help” her will test her.
Expelled again — this time for the way she expressed her trauma
The scars traveled with Mea. A 16-year-old girl arrives at school carrying four years of unprocessed sexual trauma plus the wounds of maternal betrayal. People who understand abuse could see the signs, but in school, they are mostly misunderstood. Her flinch when a classmate unexpectedly taps her on her shoulder. How she freezes when she’s called upon in health class, a remnant of more stressful times when she could not fight or flee, but it’s seen in school as defiance. When she gets angry it’s read as an attitude.
Her grandmother became sickly and couldn’t come to school to defend her. The discipline began, the referrals stacked and the suspension came. Next, a long-term suspension. Then expulsion.
Two doors had now slammed.
This is what I call the double expulsion — the cascading institutional rejection that narrows a girl’s landscape until the only door left is the one that locks behind her. She is headed to the criminal-justice system, through the street. Lacking support from family and educators, girls must find it elsewhere: 90% of participants who experienced homelessness engaged in survival behaviors during that period according to the Modern Slavery Research Project.
The street does not expel; it recruits.
The System That Was Built to Look Past Her
Nils Christie, a Norwegian criminologist, wrote that every justice system operates on an unspoken template of “the ideal victim” — like the elderly woman attacked by a stranger in broad daylight while doing something virtuous.
Mea fails every criterion. She is young and Black and looks much older than she is. She was abused by someone known to her, in the place that was supposed to be safe. But the justice system was not designed to see her, it was designed to look past her.
She did not end up in the criminal justice system because of the failure of one teacher, one caseworker, or one mother. This is structural violence, harm built into the architecture of the institutions themselves, as another sociologist, Johan Galtung describes it. We sometimes try to explain situations like Mea’s by looking at generational violence and how Mea’s mom, and maybe even Jahim himself, may have endured abuse themselves. To Galtung, who studied peace so extensively that he is known as the Father of Peace, the root of violence is much bigger than individual perpetrators; it’s structural to the point where it becomes hard to even identify perpetrators and victims anymore. Yet within that big framework of violence are specific harms that cut girls like Mea everyday.
This is what I call community abandonment — structural violence at the micro level: the specific desk, the specific decision, the specific door that closes at the moment a girl needs it open.
Build the door to help girls like Mea
Currently, Louisiana is projected to spend $93 million expanding four youth detention facilities. Many girls deemed delinquent end up at Ware Youth Center in Coushatta, a facility in north Louisiana, 280 miles from New Orleans, with a documented history of staff sexual abuse spanning more than two decades.
Louisiana is preparing to spend $93 million to send more girls like Mea to Ware, where the harm she carries are likely to be compounded by the people paid to hold her.
This hypocrisy has been criticized for years by Louisiana’s advocacy organizations like Families and Friends of Louisiana’s Incarcerated Children, the Louisiana Center for Children’s Rights, and Black Girls Rising.
The same organizations have also pushed for criminal-record expungement relief for girls who were convicted while surviving trafficking and abuse. They have asked for trauma-responsive crisis programs that intervene through schools and the foster-care system at the first disclosure, not the first arrest. They have asked the state to fund the door that will help girls out of this cycle before the state is forced to fund the cell.
The $93 million of new Louisiana funding is one answer, built in concrete and steel
The right question is the one Mea asked her mother after four years. It’s one her school never gave her a chance to ask at all: Will somebody please believe me?
Her grandma believed her, but when Grandma got sick, Mea was alone again, with other people’s poor perceptions of her, in her school and her neighborhood. She didn’t want everyone to see her as a victim. She didn’t want people to know she’d been abused. She needed protection. So she protected herself, through anger
Build the door. Before she becomes the 17-year-old girl that Louisiana sent to an adult jail, six years after she first became a victim, which set her path toward that jail.
Andrea Hagan is the founder of Pattern Hunters, LLC, a public scholarship platform that focuses on criminology, community engagement, and accountability. Further information is available at patternhunters.com.
