Olha Yarynich, Contributing Photographer

A new state legislature subcommittee hopes to improve the treatment of young girls in the juvenile justice system, including sex abuse and trafficking victims — but its narrow, gendered focus has been called into question. 

The group is tasked with researching gaps in Connecticut’s rehabilitation of juvenile justice-involved girls and developing policy recommendations for the state legislature. Another priority for the group is creating a new framework for reporting and collecting police data on human trafficking. 

Brittany LaMarr is the senior project manager of the Juvenile Justice Policy and Oversight Committee, which oversees the subcommittee — dubbed the “Gender Responsiveness Work Group.” LaMarr said the work group’s first task was defining what “gender responsive” research entailed. 

“For the sake of being able to take this one step at a time … this first report will be on youth who identify as girls under the age of 18,” she said. “If the scope of the analysis gets too unwieldy and large at first, a lot of specific and actionable items can get lost. So doing things in a smaller, more narrow and focused way is how the group has decided to take the work.” 

House Bill 5508, which laid out the aims of the work group, notes that the group’s policy recommendations must be developmentally-appropriate and trauma-informed. For example, the legislation suggests that the group consult survivors of human trafficking and sexual abuse on the most effective treatment for girls experiencing those issues.  

The group has analyzed data from the state Departments of Education, Correction and Children and Families, as well as from Connecticut’s judicial branch and law enforcement agencies. 

The report, which LaMarr said will be published by the end of the year, will also draw from juvenile justice-involved girls’ personal experiences. Members of Love146, a New Haven-based advocacy group for human trafficking survivors, and criminal justice nonprofit Roca’s Hartford chapter will conduct interviews with trafficking and abuse survivors.   

“It’s been the most restorative [approach] to have young people speak with those that they’re comfortable with, and not just putting a spotlight on them at a public meeting to share some of the most painful and dark times in their lives,” LaMarr said.

The work group also includes representatives from the Trafficking in Persons Council, which identifies services for adult trafficking survivors, and the Transforming Children’s Behavioral Health Policy and Planning Committee. 

Nathan Earl SPH ’24, a public health consultant and advocate for male survivors of sex trafficking, applauded the work group for its collaboration with the behavioral health committee. Children who are being trafficked often struggle with substance use disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder and other mental health issues, Earl said.

“While [trafficking] is a crime, it’s a healthcare issue — it’s a form of trauma,” he said. “We want to prevent this or intervene as early on, and the public health approach allows us to do that.”

Criticism of narrow scope of work group’s report

Earl, who is a trafficking survivor, questioned the work group’s singular focus on girls in the juvenile justice system, which he said reinforces the narrative that sex trafficking is solely a female issue. 

This false narrative contributes to a nationwide lack of resources for male trafficking survivors, Earl said. There is just one safe house for male sex trafficking survivors — Bob’s House of Hope in Denton, Texas — compared to hundreds of safe houses for female survivors across the U.S.

“If you’re looking at transforming a system, and you’re only looking at the needs of one point along a gender spectrum, you may have been well-intentioned, you may spend a lot of money doing that, but the system itself is not going to be transformed,” Earl said.

The majority of identified human trafficking victims tend to be female. Just 20 percent of identified trafficking victims were boys and men in 2018, according to the Counter Trafficking Data Collaborative.

Earl noted that male and female trafficking survivors tend to process trauma differently, contributing to the under-identification of male survivors. Recognized indicators of trafficking may be different for female and male survivors and could lead to male victims falling through the cracks of trafficking support systems, he said. 

Erin Williamson, chief programs and strategy officer at Love146 and a member of the work group, said over 90 percent of the child trafficking survivors in the organization’s programs are female. 

“I firmly believe that we are under-identifying male and nonbinary youth, and I think that that is largely because as a society, we don’t tend to acknowledge sexual victimization among boys and men,” Williamson said. “Our default is to think, ‘oh, they might have been engaging in some sort of criminal activity,’ as opposed to ‘they may be a victim of a sexual crime or a labor crime.’”

Future reports by the gender-responsive work group may focus on boys, according to LaMarr.

Connecticut Governor Ned Lamont signed House Bill 5508 into law in June.