Young women and punishment within and beyond the penal system

Gilly Sharpe

Feminist research on troublesome girls has revealed a close relationship between welfare and punishment, extending to the de facto punishment of girls through welfare mechanisms (for example Chesney- Lind, 1989; Carrington, 1993; O’Neill, 2001). Despite these scholarly insights, limited attention has been paid to similarities and continuities in young women’s experiences of punishment and punitiveness across penal and welfare settings, and youth justice and penal practices have tended to be considered in isolation from other institutional arrangements. Such compartmentalisation serves to fragment experiences which are overlapping and interwoven, and which may have cumulative and enduring effects on individuals over time. This chapter, through a focus on the structural and cultural contexts which shape both lawbreaking and desistance (Weaver, 2019), examines the treatment and punishment of marginalised young women across three domains: education, criminal labelling and the benefits system. Following Carvalho et al (2020, pp 265– 6), I conceptualise young women’s experience of punitiveness as multi- faceted and ‘a central feature of a range of intersecting experiences and practices’. I argue that schools, formal and informal youthful criminal labels and the welfare benefits system constitute intersecting and sometimes mutually constitutive sites of punishment which, in combination, are likely to have a toxic impact on marginalised young women’s sense of self as well as on their economic and social prospects.