A prospective study of sexual risk patterns associated with delinquency and justice involvement among child welfare system-involved male adolescents in the United States.

INTRODUCTION: Early sexual activity and teen pregnancy are known risk factors for delinquency and justice involvement among male adolescents. However, less is known about these patterns among child welfare system (CWS)-involved boys who face significant social barriers and past/current traumatic experiences. METHODS: We prospectively examined these associations among male adolescents who identified as low and high risk for child-maltreatment via a secondary data analysis of the Longitudinal Studies of Child Abuse and Neglect dataset-a large scale assessment of children, their parents, and their teachers in the United States to understand issues of child abuse and neglect. We extracted and examined data from 657 boys who were identified as at-risk for maltreatment or with histories of substantiated maltreatment at ages 6, 8, 12, 14, and 16. We used structural equation modeling to examine the relationship between sexual activity (i.e., age of sexual debut, actively having sex, and sex resulting in a child) and changes in delinquency and justice involvement. RESULTS: Male adolescents who have engaged in sex and/or have fathered a child had greater increases in delinquency over time compared to those who have not had sex. Further, fathering a child was significantly associated with justice involvement, especially for the high-risk group. CONCLUSION: Results indicate that greater efforts should be taken to ascertain CWS-involved male adolescents' sexual health practices and parenting status. Male adolescents in the CWS require support with accessing developmentally appropriate sexual health education and family services.

"Give up your mic": Building capacity and sustainability within community-based participatory research initiatives.

Community-based participatory research (CBPR) partnerships strive to promote community capacity building and sustainability, yet initiatives often suffer when grants or relationships with academic partners end. To address these concerns, researchers hoping to develop truly sustainable CBPR partnerships should consider factors that promote the development of community capacity and, ultimately, independence. In this first-person account, using perspectives gathered from FAVOR, a Connecticut-based family-led advocacy organization and an academic researcher, we examine the practices and experiences of the members of a CBPR partnership focused on using community voice to inform changes in the state's children's behavioral health system of care. These practices ultimately led to FAVOR developing the necessary skills to assume full ownership of the community data-gathering initiative, ensuring that the initiative would be sustained. Through the perspectives of five FAVOR staff and an academic researcher, we describe the factors that contributed to the organization being able to develop the capacity to independently continue their community data-gathering initiative, including description of the training process and staff members' perspectives on training, autonomy, community value, and lessons learned. We use these stories and experiences to provide recommendations for other partnerships striving to promote capacity building and sustainability through community ownership of the research process.

A Treatment-To-Prison-Pipeline? Scoping Review and Multimethod Examination of Legal Consequences of Residential Treatment Among Adolescents.

OBJECTIVE: Toward the overall goal of interrogating systems that contribute to racial inequity in child and adolescent psychology, we examine the role and function of Residential Treatment Centers (RTCs) in creating or exacerbating race and gender inequities using the language of mental health and the logic that treatment intentions justify children's confinement. METHODS: In Study 1, we conduct a scoping review to investigate the legal consequences of RTC placement, attending to race and gender in 18 peer-reviewed articles, encompassing data for 27,947 youth. In Study 2, we use a multimethod design focusing on RTCs in one large mixed-geographic county to examine which youth are formally charged with a crime while in RTCs, and the circumstances under which these charges occur, attending to race and gender (N = 318, 95% Black, Latine, Indigenous youth, mean age = 14, range = 8-16). RESULTS: Across studies, we find evidence for a potential treatment-to-prison pipeline through which youth in RTCs incur new arrests and are charged with crimes during and following treatment. This pattern is pronounced for Black and Latine youth and especially girls, for whom use of physical restraint and boundary violations are recurring challenges. CONCLUSIONS: We argue that the role and function of RTCs via the alliance between mental health and juvenile legal systems, however passive or unintentional, provides a critical exemplar of structural racism; and thus invite a different approach that implicates our field to publicly advocate to end violent policies and practices and recommend actions to address these inequities.

Police endorsement of color-blind racial beliefs and propensity to interact with youth of color.

The beliefs of police, as the point of first contact with the justice system, may help to explain disproportionate minority contact between police and young people. Color-blind racial beliefs, a form of implicit racism in which racial differences are denied, are more strongly endorsed by police than by laypeople. Using a 2 (youth race) × 3 (offense severity) experimental design, 339 officers participated in an online study examining the influence of youth race, offense severity, and officers' color-blind racial beliefs on officers' reported likelihood of interacting with young people. Officers with lower levels of color-blind beliefs reported they would be less likely to interact with Black youth. Additionally, attrition analyses indicated that officers assigned to the Black youth condition were more likely to drop out when asked to complete the measure of color-blind beliefs. Policy and practice implications are discussed, with a focus on promoting greater discussion of color-blind ideologies in multicultural trainings for police officers and increasing frank discussions about race and racial issues.