Framing Women’s Sexual Abuse of Boys in Juvenile Detention

• In Event: Sociology of Sex and Gender Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 16. Gender and Sexual Violence

Abstract

Dominant sociological paradigms construct sexual assault as expressions of unequal gendered power relations between men and women. Yet sexual victimization surveys from juvenile detention centers provide a contradictory finding: women account for nearly 90 percent of staff-on-youth sexual misconduct incidents. Youth incarceration thus offers a unique opportunity to explore how gender, age, and sexual power relations (re)shape institutional assumptions about sexual threat. Using 38 interviews with practitioners who held direct institutional knowledge of women staff’s sexual abuse of incarcerated boys, I examine how juvenile justice actors attempt to reconcile traditional assumptions about gender and violence. I find that participants both challenge and reify heteronormative assumptions about women’s emotional vulnerability and sexual passivity that minimize culpability and harm. Discursive constructions of hegemonic masculinities simultaneously shift blame towards incarcerated boys, who are characterized as having the capacity to manipulate, groom, and falsely accuse adult women staff. As such, women are encouraged to participate in “trajectory guarding” by maintaining physical and emotional boundaries from incarcerated boys. By complicating prevailing victim-perpetrator scripts, I show how traditionally male-dominated institutions maintain gendered hierarchies of male sexual dominance and women sexual passivity despite age and power differentials.

Author

• Amber Joy Powell, University of Iowa