this webinar is the fifth in the substanceabuse and mental health services administration, samhsa's, girls' matter webinar series. i'mdeborah or deb warner, the project director for samhsa's ta and training of women andfamilies impacted by substance use and mental health problems project. i'm honored thatsamhsa has invited me to serve as your moderator for this webinar series. we have a disclaimer.the webinar is supported by the substance abuse and mental health services administrationand the u.s. department of health and human services, dhhs. the contents of the presentationsdo not necessarily reflect the views or policies of samhsa or dhhs, and, of course, this webinarshould not be considered a substitute for individualized client care or treatment decisions.during and after the webinar, join the conversation
using social media. to join the conversationabout girls behavioral health, use #girlsmatter2014 on facebook and twitter. also, please go to the samhsa’s facebookpage and respond to the girls matter posting and tell us about your work with girls. iwant to take a moment to thank sharon amatetti, samhsa's women's issue coordinator, and kanaenomoto, samhsa's associate administrator for women, and principal deputy administrator,for their leadership in creating the girls matter webinar series. while there is significantknowledge about women's mental health and substance use and a growing body of knowledgeon adolescence, there is a lack of resources and information addressing the specific concernsof adolescent girls.
through this series samhsa is creating a venuefor gathering and disseminating information on the needs of adolescent girls, improvingthe workforce, and bringing together national experts and leaders across disciplines toinform our behavioral health care, which is why it's so great that we have such a diverseaudience for today. through this webinar series, samhsa is building the workforce's understandingof the needs and concern of adolescent girls and awareness and the conversations on theconcerns of adolescent girls. the response has been overwhelming. the webinars are full.leaders, providers, peers, parents, and partner agencies have all expressed excitement andrecognition that there is a gap and we need to address the concerns of adolescent girls,that girls matter.
this is the fifth of the webinars. each ofthe girls matter webinars discusses key topics with concern to adolescent girls. the firstfour webinars, which include growing up girl, adolescent development and the unique challengesfacing girls, girl in the mirror, behavioral health challenges of adolescent girls, andgirls and substance use, trends, challenges and opportunities, as well as digital girlsconnection and disconnection have been completed, and the recordings are available for viewing.be sure also to register for the final webinar after this one, the "power of youth developmentgirls recovery supports" on july 24th, with karen pittman, founder of the form for youthinvestment," as well as several young women leading recovery efforts.
while, all girls have some risk factors andmay experience some mental health and substance abuse challenges and unhealthy behaviors.today we are focusing the series of sanctuary and supports for girls in crisis. we havethree national leaders and subject matter experts specifically on adolescent girls tohelp us address the question how do we help the most vulnerable of our teen girl, thosewho may be involved in foster care or juvenile justice, experiencing sexual victimization,interpersonal violence, co-occurring mental health problems, substance abuse, school failure,and hopelessness. we'll start with presentations by stephanie covington, followed by jeanettepai-espinoza, and kim sokoloff selvaggi. after each presentation we'll have some time forquestions. after these three speak, we'll
have a panel discussion on creating sanctuaryand supports. it's now my pleasure to introduce dr. stephaniecovington. dr. covington is a nationally recognized clinician, author, organizational consultantand lecturer. she is a pioneer in the field of girls' and women's issues, addiction andrecovery. dr. covington serves as the co-director of the institution for relational developmentand the center for gender and justice. she's the author of several books, articles, researchstudies, and curricula, including voices, a program of self-discovery and empowermentfor girls and beyond trauma, a healing journey for women. she has developed an innovativegender responsive and trauma-informed approach to the treatment needs of women and girlsthat results in effective services in public,
private, and institutional settings. a friendand colleague, she is one of the most dedicated and effective innovators in creating servicesand systems that support girls and women. please welcome stephanie. thank you, deb,and thank you for including me on this series, which i think is just very important workfor us to be thinking about girls. and, you know, as we would begin to think about girlsin crisis, there are certain things that particularly put girls at risk, such as depression andsubstance abuse, girls who are in relationships, either with their family or in dating relationshipswhere there's violence, girls who have eating disorders, teen mothers, and girls in thejuvenile justice system. and any of these risks can have an impacton a girl's ability to thrive.
and when with look at any of these risks,there really are things that underlie all these risks. the overarching theme, i believe,is really trauma and abuse. so often we get focused on the girl's behaviorwithout looking at what might be underneath that, and i'm going to be talking this afternoonabout, really, two core concepts, in gender responsive and being trauma informed. nowwhen we think about being gender responsive, it's really less about the differences betweenmales and females, less about the differences between boys and girls, and it's really moreabout looking at the research on girls and women, looking at what do we particularlyknow about girls and what have we learned about girls that can help really guide whatwe do? over the years, people have struggled
with what it might mean to be gender responsive,and this is a definition that my colleague, barbara bloom, and i developed a few yearsago to help people understand the many different facets that need to be considered when we'reworking with girls and when we want to be gender responsive. so it's about creating a certain kind of environmentand thinking about where you're citing the program or providing the service, what kindof staff you're hiring, how you go about developing your program, and then the content and materialthat you use. and all of these things really need to reflectan understanding of the realities and lives of women and girls, but it also needs to addresstheir strengths and their challenges.
so it isn't just about putting girls in agroup together, while that's a good starting place, but it's looking at all these variousaspects when we're thinking about programming for girls and being gender responsive. so one of the things when we look at girlsand we look at many of the issues that girls have in some of those risks i talked about,and we think about trauma, we now learn that a trauma history can be highly associatedwith alcohol and drug use, with various high-risk behaviors, including sex work, the physicaland mental health disorders that we often see among girls, both in our community andin our juvenile justice setting. we also know for those girls who are in the juvenile justicesystem, they have much higher rates of trauma
than girls in the general population. also, the whole experience of being in a custodialsetting can be a very traumatizing experience. so while we're being gender responsive, it'svery important -- in fact, i don't believe we can be gender responsive unless we aretrauma informed. now over the years, the definition of trauma has changed. it used to be thatwe thought about trauma as an event. but today we understand that trauma is both an event,but it is also a response to the event, and so when someone can experience this eventin terms of their actual experience or they can witness an event happening to anotherperson, they could hear about an event happening to someone they care about or love, or italso can be the experience of first-hand repeated
or exposure to adverse details of traumaticevents. so this really speaks to the experience ofmany people who are working with girls and hearing girls' histories. that, in fact, couldbecome a traumatic experience. now, so it's the event, but it's also the impact of theevent. it has to have a negative impact, perhaps on girls social interactions, perhaps on theirschool work, their ability to perhaps have a part-time job, so it has to be -- it's theevent, but it's also the impact of the event that creates trauma. and this is kind of a simpler definition.it's when an external threat overwhelms a person's ability to cope, both internallyand externally.
so when we think about overwhelming experienceswe know that they have a very different impact on, let's say, a child or an adolescent oran adult, that many things that an adult can cope with, a child or an adolescent couldnot cope with. when we look again at trauma and thinking about some of the differences,we know that it's interpersonal abuse that really is the difference between the kindof abuse risks that women and girls have compared to men and boys. and so there are gender differences when wethink about trauma. and if we look over the lifespan we can beginto see how this would play out. in childhood, both boys and girls are at risk for physicaland sexual abuse, and they're at greatest
risk from people they know. in adolescence,for a boy, his greatest risk happens if he's a gay young man or a young man of color, thenhis abuse could come from someone who dislikes him. it could come from peers. it could comefrom police. if he's a gang member, it's from an oppositional gang. but for a teenage girl,her greatest risk is in her relationships from the person to whom she's saying i loveyou. as you move into adult life, for a woman, if she's in the military, her greatest riskis abuse from the men she serves with, and in her personal life, if she's living in ourcommunity, that's again from her relationships, whereas for men, if they're living in ourcommunities, their great risk is being a victim of crime committed by a stranger.
so we begin to think clinically that femaleshave more mental health risks connected to trauma because of this difference. it's verydifficult to make sense of why someone would harm you. and i think this slide, from a very new studyin canada, looking at boys and girls in their juvenile justice system, just this "have youever been raped or in danger of being raped?" look at the difference of red for femalesversus males. it tells us something about the gender difference in the worlds our boysand girls are living in. now one of the things we've learned about trauma is how it impactsthe brain, and this is particularly important for children, for young people, because thebrain is still in development.
and so the primary things that happen haveto do with emotions, have to do with behavior, and have to do with relationships. and so when we look at children we begin tosee that they very often have a difficulty with attachment in their relationships. theyhave difficulty with regulation, being able to regulate their feelings and their behavior. and they have difficulty learning in termsof competencies and what happens in school. so, because there's so much abuse in our society,people are now beginning to talk about becoming trauma informed and how important this is. and many people think that becoming traumainformed means that somehow you took a course
on trauma or perhaps you listened to thiswebinar. but it's much more complex than that. it really is about understanding trauma butadjusting how we provide services so people can benefit from what we're trying to providefor them. and there's some core principles in becomingtrauma informed. it's about creating emotional and physical safety, being trustworthy, doingwhat you say you're going to do, providing choice so that girls can make choices; thatthey have a sense they're in collaboration with you, and they're learning skills andfeeling empowerment. and many people feel they're doing those things,but often we're doing business as usual and we're forgetting what are some of the primarythings that we need to be providing.
so becoming trauma informed really createsa culture shift. it really means we change how we're doing business, and it involvesevery aspect of every program. it's not just the clinical staff, as i said, going to atrauma training, but it's everybody who is interacting with the girls needs to be involved. and i want to share my favorite trauma, informedstory, which is about my dentist. and here is a woman who changed her dentalpractice because she understood that in dentistry there are many triggers which are sight, sound,smells, and an environment, that can impact a survivor so that they have difficulty gettingdental health. and so her in practice now there's televisionsin the ceiling so people can listen to music
and be distracted. they have people do breathingexercises before they put a heavy weight on someone when they're doing the x-ray. peopleare told they can get up and walk around. the dentist became trauma informed. she'snot providing trauma treatment but she changed how she was doing business, and that's reallywhat we're talking about here. this chart can really show us how some of the linkageshappen. you have a traumatic event, there's the initial response, the changes in the nervoussystem, even changes in the brain, particularly if there are multiple instances of childhoodsexual abuse. and then there's this trigger, the currentstressor, the reminder, and a girl in a painful emotional state, and we see three sort ofbasic categories of responses. the retreat
responses would be our kind of mental healthresponses, the disassociation of the mind/body split, the depression and anxiety that i mentionedearlier, the harm to self, which could be eating disorders, substance abuse, or theharm to others, which would be the aggression and violence and rages. now one of the waysto also think about these inner connections is looking at the ace study, the adverse childhoodexperiences study, where they polled adults with ten questions and began to see that manyof the things that happened before age 18 have an impact later in life. so we understand that for girls, if they'vehad any of these experiences, it puts them at greater risk for certain issues that they'regoing to struggle with in terms of health
and mental health in their adult lives. and so the questions were this: and those of you who are participating inthe webinar may want to answer these questions, think about your answers for yourself andfor a typical girl that you work with. and so before age 18 experiencing recurrentand severe emotional abuse, experiencing recurrent and severe physical abuse, contact sexualabuse, emotional neglect, physical neglect, and then before age 18, did you grow up ina household where both biological parents weren't present, your mom was being treatedviolently, you grew up with an alcoholic or drug-using person, there was a mentally ill,chronically depressed, or a family member
who attempted suicide or a family member whowas in prison. and i would guess that many people on thiswebinar are going to have a score of four or more on these ten questions and that almostall of the girls you work with will also have a score of four or more. and that score of four or more seemed to bethe cut-off point. they found, initially when they looked at this, that people 50 yearslater in their lives were the ones who were at greater risk for smoking, alcoholism, theinjection of illegal drugs and obesity. they then looked at all the various chronic healthconditions that people often struggle with, and so we begin to see that these experiencesthat girls have before age 18 in their lives,
they can become precursors for what can happenlater in life. and the people who do the ace study -- andthere are two websites there that you'll be able to get more information -- they talkabout these adverse childhood experiences that disrupt neurological development. peopleend up with social, emotional, and cognitive impairment, they adopt health risk behaviors,they have disease disability and social problems, and it leads to early death. so many of the issues that we're working within girls have their root or their source, very often, in these adverse childhood experiences.now we can also look at crittenton -- and jeannette will be talking more about her programlater -- which is a national organization
that serves girls in the united states, didthe ace study questionnaire on the girls that they serve, and you can begin to see, again,the high scores that the girls had, the girls that were served by crittenton, over 900 girls,but then they broke them out into who were the young mothers, who were the young motherswho also were in the juvenile justice system, again, you see the highest scores there, andthen the young mothers who were in child welfare. so this study can help us a lot, i think,to understand the source of many of the struggles girls are having. here is looking at the acestudy, a score of four or more yeses, the risk of having some difficulty learning, 51%compared to those with an ace score of zero, so looking at the impact with school. whatwe know about trauma is it creates pathways
for girls, that often they're not doing wellin school, they're not interacting well with peers, they're not doing well with their teachers. and what we see when we look at school failureis trauma can create what we call "toxic stress." that's that adversity of toxic stress, theimpact on the brain. the arousal system is overly developed. when we look at the hippocampus,memory, the ability to learn, to be able store memory, it helps us to understand more, again,about girls' struggles. now this is a slide about a high school for girls and boys onprobation in walla walla, washington, where they changed how they were doing business,and they began to understand the concept of the ace study and becoming trauma informed,and they changed what they were doing, and
you'll see what changed in the high school.the number of suspensions went down, the number of expulsions, the number of written referrals. so here is an example of a culture changein a high school. and so, again, trauma really becomes a biologicpipeline into corrections, low-wage jobs, homelessness and poverty. and often, unfortunately, our systems of careoften respond with punishment. and so when we think about creating sanctuary,which is the focus of today's webinar, we create sanctuary when we create a trauma-informedenvironment, when we understand the impact of abuse and violence in girls' lives, thatwe create physical and emotional safety to
help prevent all of the things that creategreater risk for girls, that there's an atmosphere that's respectful of girls. it's about safety,and we eliminate as many triggers as possible. we help girls to increase their choices sothat they have a sense of control over their lives and we become culturally competent andunderstand how that is impacting her experiences and world view. and we use universal precautions, which reallyis about the dentist story again, where everybody in her dental practice is treated as thoughthey're a trauma survivor. it doesn't have a negative impact on those who aren't, andit has an incredibly powerful impact on those who are, much like we've done over the yearswith medical precautions around hiv and aids.
we also need support for girls, and here,what's most important, is we talk about what's going to help relationships and a sense ofconnection. we know that when you work with young people, one secure attachment createsthe seed for resiliency to be built. and this connection needs to be patient, kind,sensitive, and comforting so that a sense of healing can actually take place. we certainlywant to have a balance between validating girls' strengths and resilience, but we alsohave to accommodate for their vulnerabilities, and we need to make a shift from what's wrong,what's wrong with her, what's missing, to thinking about resiliency and support, theskills and resources that she needs, and having a sense of hope.
and so we've been talking about being traumainformed. trauma specific is what we actually do with girls. and then i'm going to suggest to you voicesas a program that deb mentioned earlier, that helps girls begin to think about the issuesof trauma in their lives, as well as multiple other issues that girls are dealing with. and in closing, i want to leave you with thisthought. it came out of an article in the "new york times" a couple of years ago, andi thought it was very powerful. they talked about moral challenges, that the moral challengeof the 19th century was slavery, the moral challenge of the 20th century was totalitarianism.but the moral challenge of our century, of
the 21st century is brutality against womenand girls, and i think each one of us need to think about what commitment we can maketowards meeting this moral challenge in terms of helping girls become whole. thank you.oh, thank you very, very much, stephanie. we do have time for a few questions, and isee the question-and-answer box there's a lot of people saying thank you and great information. and we do have a few questions. i'm just goingto ask you a couple i think we have time for. the first one says, "you talk about how aidsand trauma impact the brain and development, what are reasonable expectations for girlswho have experienced a lot of abuse and exploitation?" you know, i think it's very individualized,that it's always amazing to me, you can meet
girls where there's been a lot of abuse andexploitation and they are doing well, and other girls are struggling. so while we have sort of general informationabout impact, it does impact each person in very specific ways. and i think particularly when jeannette talksnext and talks about girls, sharing some stories. so we can't say that if this happens it alwaysmeans this. when certain things happen, when abuse happens, when exploitation happens,the risk goes up and then there's the question of resiliency, why are some girls more resilientthen others, and often that has to do with relationship and connection in their lives.okay, thank you.
and this person asks, "how do we keep girlssafe?" oh, that's a good question; how do we keep girls safe? you know, i think thathelping to educate girls is one thing, but i think that's a much larger social issue.you know, how do we prevent this, as i said in the last slide there, the brutality againstwomen and girls in our society? and a lot of that has to do with not justprotecting girls but how do we diminish the violence that permeates our society, and alsolook at the continuing sexism and gender inequity; that girls are considered less than, and anytime we have a group that's in a less powerful position, whether it's because of race orclass or sex or whatever, they're at greater risk for abuse. that is built into the structureof our society. great. thank you.
and then another person that sort of tiesto that asks about ways to buffer and create resiliency in girls before they experiencetrauma. you know, when you look at the resiliency work, there's several things that seem tomake a difference, and one is girls having the experience that what they think and whatthey feel matters, that they have one person in their life, at least one person in theirlife that supports them, that they feel supported by, and that they feel that they have someimpact in their environment, that these are some of the things that girls who are resilienthave experienced versus girls who feel totally powerless, girls who feel isolated, girlswho feel like anything they say or do really makes no difference to anyone. great. thankyou.
and i love this question. it's a little long,so i'm just going to read it. it says, "i agree connection is important. manipulationis a girl's survival strategy but also a real problem behavior. how do we address it whena girl is trying to manipulate us?" manipulation is always used by people who feel powerless. so she's feeling powerless so you have tofind some ways to work with her where she has an increased sense of her own personalpower and she can learn to be more direct. the other word we use is strategic. you know,when people are manipulating us, and we don't see it in a negative way, we think they'rebeing strategic. so you may want to change and think abouthow strategic she's being and then help her
to find better ways to get her needs met.great. thank you, stephanie. and we're going to move to jeannette pai-espinosanext. and, stephanie, we'll hear back from you after the other presentations. great,thanks, deb. we're giving you an invisible round of applause. and next, i am excited to introduce jeannettepai-espinosa, another leader in creating opportunities for girls. jeanette serves as the presidentof the national crittenton foundation. the national crittenton foundation and it's familyof agencies have been supporting girls, young women, and their families for more than 130years. the national crittenton foundation serves as an umbrella for the 27 members ofthe crittenton family of agencies providing
services in 32 states and the district ofcolumbia. miss pai-espinosa has more than 35 years of experience in advocacy, education,intercultural communication, public policy, program development, and direct service delivery.she is currently chair of the national foster care coalition, co-director of the nationalgirls institute of the department of justice, office of juvenile justice and delinquencyprevention, and a member of the board of directors at the human rights project for girls. jeannette,are you ready to begin? yes, i am. okay, thank you. we hear you. great. so thank you, deb, and thank you stephanie,for such a great opening to the workshop. so i am going to talk -- i'm going to reallyfocus my time on sharing with you sort of
the perspective of young women and women whohave been through different systems and through different programs, primarily crittenton,but not all crittenton programs. and this includes conversations with youngwomen that are currently retaining services but also women who are in their late 20s andearly 30s, and some even a little bit older, who have the ability to look sort of backon their lives and to tell us what really made a difference, what worked and what actuallydidn't work. so next slide. so that will be the basis for many of my comments. and we can go ahead, next slide. okay, sojust a little bit about programs that are
transitioning to a trauma-informed agendaresponses approach. as stephanie said, it really is a cultural shift, but organizationstend to first, really focus on physical safety, risk reduction, really a strong focus on managinggirls' behaviors, rules and procedures, and, of course, adding gender and trauma-informedassessments and treatments, which, of course, should be a given. not that these are notimportant but they really are only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to what's effectivefor girls and to really having a trauma-informed gender responsive approach. the other thingthat i want to say is that we often take for granted the importance of helping staff ormanagement all the way, horizontally and vertically, and really addressing what are their biasesand issues related to girls, because even
the best training is not going to addressthe sort of deeply held biases that we might have about girls. next slide. so to move beyond those sort of basic firststeps and to really build a trauma-informed environment, you also have to focus on thecues in the physical environments, and i'll talk more specifically about some examples;a shift in the culture from control to collaboration; the importance of clear core operating values;and setting clear expectations for staff. as i said in the last slide, treatment reallyis a given, so, really, that's a place where we start. but we really have to move muchmore deeply into the culture and in relationships and what we're modeling for girls.
so as we go to the next slide, i thought itwould be important to share the stories of two women who are very different but who intheir own words describe for us what a trauma-informed environment was, and what a difference itmade in their lives. so i'm going to read you two story. i'm goingto read you tanya's first. hers is a little bit longer, and then we'll look at a slidelater about some of the core values that are embedded in her story, which really are theway that she describes the trauma-informed environment, and then we'll do the same forashley. so i want to start by giving you some backgroundon tanya's story. tanya was raised by a single mother. she was physically and emotionallyabused by her mother on a regular basis, but
she was also repeatedly sexually abused byher mother's boyfriend and male friends. in an effort to get help, tanya told her motherabout the sexual abuse but was then told that it was her fault. so to escape her life, you know, the pain,the betrayal, and the abuse, she started running away and taking refuge on the streets. eventuallyshe was picked up and detained for running away, and then in court her mother told thejudge that tanya was incorrigible. she was then placed in a secure juvenile detentionfacility, and after being released, she was returned again to her mother. her experiencereally mirrors that of many girls that end up in the juvenile justice system and somethat we find who are living on the streets
for long periods of time who are detained[inaudible] for action that really were cries for help not criminal behavior. her time inthe juvenile justice detention only, of course, served to further traumatize her. after returning home to her mother, she discoveredthat nothing had changed and she continued to run away to escape the abuse again. onenight when she was out on the street, she was propositioned by a man to have sex forshelter. this frightened her so badly that she actually called the police herself. atthat point, she was sent to a shelter, and then later, with the involvement of her caseworker, was placed at florence crittenton services in charleston, south carolina, whereshe was able to begin the process of healing.
what i'm going to read next is what tanyahas written. the first part is what she wrote as she was getting to crittenton over 20 yearsago, and the last part is part of sort of her retrospective look at where she was andwhere she is now. "it's cold outside on this rainy day. as i open the car door to get outof the passenger side, i make sure to squeeze my coat a little bit closer to my body soi'm able to preserve as much warmth as i can. as i follow the woman to the front door ofthis huge house i get more and more apprehensive. it was not long ago that i was enjoying thelaughter of my brothers surrounding me. i'm young, frightened, and feeling alone. at 15 i'm pregnant with a child. i'm now inthe lobby area of this huge house. i'm beginning
to feel better because this lobby is morelike a common living room. i used to run away from my own home more times than i can remember,but for the first time in my life, i think maybe i want to stay put. in walks a smallpetite woman with the most amazing smile. she's here to welcome me into the house. aftertalking with her, the caseworker that brought me here, the woman then walked over to meto introduce herself. i prepared for judgment, but instead, i was met with warmth and acceptance.some time has passed and i have adjusted to life in a house filled with other females.as i walk down the stairs to meet with the counselor assigned to me while i am here,my heart is beating fast. i must now go and share with this woman about my life, the onei have never spoken to anyone. i know this
is my only chance to escape the life thatis attempting to keep me chained to a cycle of poverty and self-imposed oppression. buti learned to dream here in my new home. i have learned that people care and that mylife has meaning. there is no way that i can go back to where i came from. i know thatnow. an unseen force is propelling me forward, that place inside me is telling me to thati must do this now. now, more than 20 years later, i know thatat that house i had the ability to learn skills that still helped me to this day to thrive.i learned that i could have goals and achieve them. i learned that compassion and love wasmore than simply a setting, and that strangers can become family. i learned tenacity andresilience. i learned courage, not the kind
that's the loudest voice in the room but thekind that keeps showing up every day ready to begin anew." so on the next slide we see the core valuesthat are really embedded in her descriptions of crittenton, and those values that she attributesto really giving her a new lease on life, a home-like setting, high expectations. welike to talk relentlessly high expectations where she was able to learn to dream, thepositive environment, welcoming, a big smile, a calmness, acceptance, compassion, peoplecaring, non-judgmental environment, and values, a realization that her life really did havemeaning and strong relationships. so that's tanya. the next is ashley, and we'llstay on this slide until i finish ashley's
story. ashley is much younger than tanya.she writes, "times have been hard more me. my father began sexually molesting me beforei was four, and it went on for eight years. i didn't know my mom until i was 11, and eventhen she was strung out on meth. i started doing drugs at 12, and by then i had alreadybeen drinking with my dad for a while. why? because i needed to escape from my life. soonenough i was an addict and i got into a fight that resulted in assault charges. it's difficultto admit but i became so depressed that i tried to commit suicide on many occasions.i was in a very dark place. i had been in several placements, include residential programsand in psychiatric care. they didn't really stick, even though i wanted to turn my lifearound. by then i knew what i needed to do,
but i needed a push and a place to do it.finally, i found treatment and counseling, and most importantly, a home at the whiteshield center in portland, oregon. no one wants to be in a program like this at first. but when you're finally faced and people believein you, care about you, and don't judge you and even take you back when you make mistake,with all this then you can have and think about having and accomplishing your goals.when i look back on it i can see what big difference it makes. now i'm 20 and cleanand sober. it's still tough at times, but i try to remember what i learned and holdonto the beliefs i have in me. i realize that without the support i got from white shieldi probably wouldn't be where i am right now
in my life. i might not even be alive. i nowhave a relationship with my mom, which is a big change, because before white shield,neither of us could stand being in the same room with each other. today i've realize thatthe biggest thing that i got from my time in treatment was how to be a better ashley,for me and for my family." so now if we do go to the next slide and welook at the values that are embedded in ashley's story, we hear a lot of the same things thatwe saw in tanya's, home-like setting, safe, people care, non-judgmental. so while they're the same, i think the importantcommonality between their stories is that as different as they are, so ashley was inwhite shield from about 2008 to 2011. she
grew up in the northwest. she's white. she's20. she's still 20 now. tanya was in south carolina at the charleston agency more than20 years ago. she's african american. their experiences, while they share some similaritiesare, in many ways very different on the things that worked and made a difference for themare really, really very much the same, and it is being a caring trauma-informed gender-responsiveenvironment. so i think their stories underscore the importanceof -- we can go to the next slide. their stories underscore some factors that are really importantas we look at how we develop programs and services. next slide. so it emphasizes -- i'm just going to go onand go a little bit ahead of the slide.
so it underscores the importance of emphasizinga specific set of core values that dominate the organizational culture. it really callsinto life the importance of all staff being trained and how to maintain the caring andcompassionate trauma-informed environment. we're not just talking about the clinicalstaff. we're talking about people who clean the grounds, who take care of the grounds,who clean the buildings, who serve food, who work this the library, who work in the school.really everyone is a part of creating this sort of caring trauma-informed environment,which means it's also really important to provide support for staff in dealing withany vicarious trauma that they may experience. and, again, it's really important to helpstaff in addressing their own biases about
girls. everybody in the environment has tobe supportive. several years ago i worked on a panel for an ojjdp conference about presentationon a girls. we took a panel of girls, and, unfortunately, after the panel, a number ofthe young women heard some of the staff saying, "oh, i don't want to deal with girls, they'rejust too dramatic. i'd rather have boys." so, again, our own biases get in the way ofus being able to set up the right kind of environment and culture. the next slide. so the last sort of piece that their storiesunderscore is the need to look at the non-verbal cues in your environment. so that is the affirming and inspirationalposters on the wall of successful women and
girls, and perhaps art work done by womenin the program, which completes the environmental surrounding of them in this sort of nurturing,accepting relentlessly high expectation environment. and just to close on that piece, if we lookat the next slide, the compilation of the core values that rose to the top when we dida survey of young women who are currently in programs and who were recently out of programs,so it's really important building aspirations and relentlessly high expectations; forgiveness,being forgiven for making mistakes; compassion; justice and equity; non-judgmental attitudes;transparency; trust; honesty; focus on relationships; that everyone needs to walk the talk; collaboration;patience; and humor. so on the next slide we look at the thingsthat girl know that they're going to get or
expect that they'll get when they go to anyprogram when they're in need of intensive services. the next slide. so they know that they're going to get therapy,and therapy, and more therapy, individual and group, family and individual, and mostof them eventually come to the point where they want that and understand that they haveit. they know that they're going to face rules, they're going to face structure, they're goingto face direction, which they lack, as they are often put to them as suggestions as directions.they'll get pregnancy prevention information. if they need it, they'll get treatment foraddiction, and they'll get support in addressing how to manage their anger. interestingly enough,those are not the things that rise to the
top of their list when you talk to them 10or 20 years later about what works for them. so what girls say they need, onto the nextslide, please. so what girls say that that need -- i'm goingto push ahead a little bit -- is probably the most important factor is the nature oftheir relationships with staff, that those relations have to be genuine, caring, respectful,and honest. and they're very clear that this doesn't meanthat they have to feel like everybody loves them like a daughter, or everybody reallythinks they're just the greatest thing, but that, really, their relationships are genuineand respectful and honest and transparent. they really crave the understanding. theywant people to understand that they really
feel like in their life that they have noone they can go to or trust, but that it's something they want very, very badly. and i think sometimes, coming from a middleclass perspective, it's really hard for us to accept that there are young people whodon't have anyone to go to, who have no one to trust, and so we tend to judge or to secondguess whether that's really a reality for them. they also want an acceptance; that theydon't think that they have value or that their life has a lot of meaning. so we will often ask them questions aboutwhy they don't have hopes and goal or why their goals aren't high enough, their expectationsaren't high enough. but their comment is,
you know, it's really hard to set goals andexpectations if you don't believe you have value or any self-worth. and they are looking for more compassion andunderstanding in working through that with staff rather than being judged for the inabilityto come up with the right hopes and goals. they have very clear expectations. the staffneed to walk their talk. they are short on patience, and i'm sure all of you know this,if you've work with girls short on patience for hypocrisy, or if you're teaching conflictresolution and anger manager skills to young women, and your staff are not manifestingthat, it's going to be a problem. and they are really clear that they need affirmationfor everything. they love certificates for
very small achievements, as well as the bigachievements. going on to some other things that they say they need -- next slide -- oneof the things that they want is they want recognition that their anger and distrustis in many ways, a natural outcome of their lives. they don't always want it to be seenas a mental illness or something that is wrong with them but rather that, given the contextof their lives that any one of us might be angry. so questions that they get about why are youangry, as opposed to well i'd probably be angry too if i had gone through what you wentthrough, so what are going to do about that is a big shift that they would like for staffto make. they want support in learning how
to set boundaries, even when they complainabout it. they talk a lot about programs that try to keep girls apart, and yet they areteaching girls how to set boundaries and healthy relationships, but they're not able to practicethose skills in programs because there's so much structure that the girls can't interactand face some of the challenges that they're going to face out in their lives when theygo back home or go back into the community. girls have a strong need and want opportunitiesto make a difference in the lives of others and to give back. that could be building aplayground with another non-profit. it could be a book-ordering project or the program,it can be anything. it could be something they think of or it could be something that'sin partnership with another organization.
a couple other things that they say that theyneed -- next slide, please. they want to be taught that it takes time to heal, that it'sa process, that it's not a straight line. one of the comments that always stuck withme is a group of young women who said, you know, we come into programs and we're madeto feel like when we complete our plan or our program that our healing is over. and their needs to be a realistic expectationset up for us that, really, we're beginning the process of healing, but that it's goingto take us a very, very long time, and that that's okay, that there's not something wrongwith us if we're not able to heal by the time we leave the program. they want a mix of leftand right brain. of course this goes back
to brain development research, creative opportunities.they want opportunities to practice what they learn and to make positive choices. they talka lot about programs over protecting them to avoid the drama in the program and thatthat doesn't give them the opportunity to practice making good choices. finally, inthe last slide -- i'm going to whiz through these -- they want opportunities to sharetheir stories with each other. it could be during a movie night, seeing a movie thatfacilitates the conversation, a book or an article or some kind of activity, but theyhave the need to connect with other young women and to share their stories and to helpeach other as it says in the second bullet. and finally, they want support in learningto establish positive relationships with girls,
since girls are most often seen as competition.it's something they struggle with and they know that they're going to need the supportof girls like them and young women like them once they leave the program. and just to close, the last, really, is areiteration, last slide, of them wanting to learn how to establish healthy relationshipsbut wanting staff to understand that if you've never -- if those healthy relationships havenever been modeled for you, it's going to be difficult for you to establish them andso you're going to need some additional help, and then finally, they really want to be involvedin the development of their plan. while they know they might not be able to make all thefinal decisions, they do want to have a voice
and to be empowered to make choices and givetheir opinions. they want to feel like we have the expectation of them that they can'tcontribute to their healing process. that's it. great. thank you so much jeannette. sure. what wonderful direct feedback fromgirls in terms of what they need and their stories and the work of the crittenton foundationand program. we have time, i think, for one, possibly two questions. and, again, here,too, we're getting a lot of people who saying thank yous and great presentations, but wedo have a few questions which have come in. one of the questions responds to the statementabout girls being too dramatic and asks what kind of staff development do you do to buildattitudes and attributes so staff are respectful
and genuine but also set boundaries for girls?sure. well i think that's one place where our own biases seem to come into play. wheni've done training with groups of staff and talk about this, you know, there's a real-- there's a stereotype of girls who experienced a lot of drama, particularly if they're inthe juvenile justice or foster care, homeless or runaway youth, or have addiction issues,that they're bad girls, so that their drama means trouble. but if you push past that andtalk with staff who have their own children or have been around girls, adolescent girls,it doesn't represent trouble, it's just represents that’s how girls are when they're throughadolescence. they have a lot of expression and a lot of need to talk about how they'refeeling.
so i think part of how we judge whether that'sa good behavior or bad comes from our own bias. and i think, again, it's really just to talkwith them directly about the impact of what they're doing on themselves and others isthe quickest way to get them to understand and to shift -- to make their own choice toshift their behaviors. great. thank you. and then another person asks, "how do youhelp girls build their strengths?" well that's a great question. i mean i think the firstthing is to assure them that they have them, and then to find ways for them to have smallsuccesses. so we do a lot of work with young women speakingin public, whether that's at the agency level
or just with each other, and really startingwith very small assignments and just continually having positive expectations. and i think in many instances it is your beliefin them that exceeds their belief in themselves that is what's going to propel them forward.sometimes it can feel risky because you don't really know whether they're going to be ableto do it. but nine times out of ten they will. great. thank you so much. and we're going to now turn it over to kim,and we'll look forward to hearing again from you during the closing remarks and panel discussion.kimberly sokoloff selvaggi was recently named the executive director at living and safealternatives incorporated, or lisa, which
provides independent living group homes forgirls and community-based life skills programming for system-involved youth. she also servesas the president of taylor lane consulting. miss sokoloff selvaggi is the co-author ofthe "trauma informed effective reinforcement system, tier, for girls," which offers a comprehensivegender-responsive program model for residential programs and facilitates, and that's whatshe'll be speaking about today. she's also created mariposa, a personal empowerment programfor girls, and speak up, youth led advocacy programs for girls. kim sokoloff selvaggi,are you with us? i am. can you hear me? great. we hear you and you should also havecontrol of the slides. it was moving very
slowly for jeannette, so if you it's movingvery slowly for you and you want to shift it over, then just ask noah to take it over.okay. i believe i'm getting control right now. oh, there. okay, are you -- oh, let mesee if i can get this. well first of all, while we're trying to figure this out, i wantto say thank you for having me be part of this webinar, and thank you, stephanie, forall of your great work, and, jeannette, for sharing the voices of girls. i'm really proudto be sharing with this model with you. myself and my co-author, we feel it's showing tremendouspromise to help programs really apply the concepts that we're hearing about today. hopefullyyou'll get to see that it's reflective of how trauma-informed and gender responsivepractice can get infused within a programmatic
culture. so i'm going to provide a quick overview ofthe model and really try to give you some examples of the components so you can seehow it works. i'm hoping also that you can see how the skills that girls will learn throughthis type of system can be really helpful no only while they're with you but also intheir lives beyond your care, which is really the point of the work that we do with girls. so, first, the tier system for girls is agender responsive research-based system. it's comprehensive, and what i mean by that isthat it's not just a system to reinforce positive behaviors, it's really about creating a completeshift in the way that you run your program
or facility. and it's specifically designed for residentialprograms, so detention, group homes, and even longer-term residential programs. we've begunalso adapting it for adult women's programs and even a women's prison. and tier integrates trauma-informed and gender-responsivepractices with motivational interviewing techniques, which i know many of you have probably heardof and maybe even used, and it's a model that really requires a lot from staff. it reallyis asking staff to fill their tool box with new more effective skills that we're seeingare more helpful and effective referrals. we really created this system initially toreplace traditional compliance focused behavioral
management systems. and when i say "compliance focused," whati'm talk about are your traditional points and level systems about behavior managementapproaches that outline a set of rules where the staff decide what points the girls get,and those points are levels that she's earned can be taken away when staff decides she'smisbehaving. so these are systems that are imposed on girlsnot systems that work with girls. and what we're trying to do is help girlslearn new skills. so the thing about compliance-focused programsis that they're just temporarily suppressing certain behaviors. they're not doing anythingto teach or guide girls towards behavior change,
and that's what we really want is intrinsicbehavior change. so to make sure that we're all on the samepage, i wanted to take a minute to define what we mean when we see the word "safe,"because safety is really the underpinning of the entire model. so to create a sense of physical safety forgirls, we need to create a space that looks and feels like girls space where no physicalharm will come to the girls or to the staff or to their things or where they're livingor staying. and to create a sense of emotional safety,we need to create a program, culture that really respects and values girls, that understandsthe challenges that girls are facing and is
offering the support to girls when they'restruggling. and to create a sense of psychological safety,we need to prioritize consistency. probably the biggest struggle for most programs, andwe're talking here about goals to schedule, the environment, but most importantly is howthe staff respond to the issues and problems that girls are presenting. and it's no surprise to most of you that staffconsistency is one of the most important features of a safe program culture. when we go outand, you know, i was consulting for several years, and before that in the juvenile justicesystem for a dozen years, and we would do many assessments on sort of how things weregoing or is it trauma informed or gender responsive,
when we talked to girls about typical consequencesfor specific behavior, they say things like, "well it depends on who's working." and then we'd ask the staff, "how do you respondto certain behaviors," and they said, "well, to be honest, it really depends on who isworking." so this is not what we're talking about. we'retrying to turn that tide and make it much more predictable. the framework that we seeworking best with girls is one that's reflecting how they see the world. so we frame things in the tier system aroundhow we believe they see their world and how they're telling us how they see their world.their daily responsibilities are something
we're going to talk about in a minute, andthat's sort of looped into this framework. but, so just to sort of give this some clarity,when we talk about the myself domain, we're really focusing on teaching girls about thevalue of their unique self, really by helping them explore and identify who they are, wherethey want to go, and ideas about how they're going to get there. in my relationships, we'rehelping girls focus on what a healthy relationship looks like and feels like, because most ofyou know, they haven't had a lot of experience with good healthy relationships. and in my community, we're helping girls learnhow to be part of, but also contribute to, a safe empowering program culture, again,not something that they have a lot of experience
with. most of our girls are coming from environmentsthat just aren't safe. they're chaotic. they're, at times, dangerous. and so this is coming from a lot of the placesthat they spend a lot of time. so because they haven't had time to reallyexperience what a safe environment looks like they haven't had a lot of time, necessarily,to heal. but here we're trying to help girls be positively reinforced by staff when they'repositively contributing to the safety of the program. so just really quickly, i wanted the giveyou a list of some of the components in the system that help foster the kind of environmentthat i've been talking about.
so we really stress new communication skillsfor staff. we outline daily responsibilities for the girls, which are actually co-developedwith girls before the system is implemented. we have something called "memberships," whichaccess privileges, so we use the term, you know, membership has its privileges; the dailydozen, which i'll talk about; the tier behavior interventions, which are tools for staff;community theme of the day; social issue sundays; gatherings; the personal coach; and the mailbox. so to start off, the daily responsibilities,this is really the heart of the system, and it's how we reframe rules language into meaningfulresponsibilities that the girls are responsible for each day. and, again, these are organizedinto the domains of myself, my relationships,
and my community. so instead of random rules that don't oftenmake sense to the girls, or they say that don't make sense to them, we're trying toframe this in a way that girls understand, the way that girls see the world. so just to make sure -- and hold on for asecond -- make sure that we're all on the same page, the daily responsibilities arethe tasks and behaviors that are expected of girls while they stay with us in the program. so they learn to be responsible for workingon their responsibilities each day within these domains, and how well she does in meetingher responsibilities determines how many opportunities
and community privileges she might have. and here is just a quick example of a partof a daily responsibility review form, and this is where staff spend a few minutes eachday one on one to find out how each girl is doing in a particular area, and so the sheetis both a prompt for staff but also a place the document this two-way conversation. and the purpose of this is really to helpher think about her behavior, her needs and to ask for support, and also for the staffto catch her doing something well, to point out a strength. so it's a really good opportunity to givethe girl a voice in her own successes and
outline what she needs in a real quick kindof check-in with staff. so just real quickly about the tier systemmembership, tl and c were represented on the previous page, and sort of that's how a girland a staff would work together to determine how well she's doing in meeting her responsibilities.when she's struggling she's in thinking. i need to think more about completing my responsibilities.maybe i need some more help or support. learning, i'm getting there. i'm learning to how todo well with these responsibilities, and contributing, i'm making contributions towards the safetyof this program. so a contribute membership would be awardedto a girl who was really doing well and making contributions to the safe environment, bothfor herself, for her relationships, and the
community in which she's living. we learnedover the years that some girls earning a membership over a series of days or even a week is justtoo long, that some girls really need daily motivators, so, you know, they just can'twait to, you know, gain access to the privileges or responsibilities that a membership wouldaward. so what we did was we created something called"the daily dozen." and so this is particularly helpful for girlswho are struggling. so in each 24-hour period, girls have theopportunity to earn privileges every day, and this is really an incentive program thatwill help her promote some healthy safe behaviors when, again she's struggling.
so regardless of which membership she's earned,she can get some success. and there are six areas where girls can earnadditional privileges. those are things like special activities or an event that mighttake place that evening. we're not talking about big ticket items, things like havingdinner with the program manager or access to a yoga class. in one of our group homesgirls earn something called "boutique bucks," which allows them to shop for little goodiesin the program boutique. and the thing is about this, the daily dozen,as well as the membership, is that all the incentives have to be things that the girlsactually want to do or gain or learn. so you have to develop the system with them.this is not void of their voice. it's all
about finding out where they're at and whatthey want and what they need. so here is an example of a daily dozen worksheet,but these can be customized for any setting. so here we have really simple prompts. youknow, this is something that we used in a detention center in canada actually. did youcomplete your evening routine, did you complete your morning routine, you know, basic thingsto help girls who are struggling just attain some kind of success each day. and the reason it's a dozen is because wegive a value of two for each yes response, and so 6 times 2 is 12. so these are some of the key points aboutmaking all of this work. the first is as residents
or clients demonstrate safe healthy behaviors,the girls get access to more privileges and opportunities, but also more community responsibility.no membership is a bad membership, so wherever they're at is okay because that's just wherethey're at and what they need. once something is earned it can't be unearned. privilegesare only limited for severe unsafe behaviors. once they earn a privilege, unless somethingreally goes haywire, she's not going to lose that privilege. and the real key to all of this is staff,and as i mentioned earlier, consistency is one of the biggest problems we have when we'redoing this work with new programs. so we have to try to provide staff with boththe skills, but also the framework and infrastructure
to be successful. and we know that, despite staff's very bestefforts, girls are going to be difficult. they're going to present challenging behaviorsbecause it's sort of normal given what they've had to deal with or struggle with. so it's how and when and what the staff sayto intervene that can make or break this kind of a system. and we really believe that this set of standardizedinterventions can work pretty well with our girls. so really quickly, a verbal reminder at sortof the beginning is used, and we teach staff
how to do all of these different interventions.but this is used for a real minor difficulty, sort of a redirection if a girl might be swearingfor example. coaching, that's that next level. this is for moderate time of difficulties,and staff are taught a technique, a coaching technique to really verbally process the situationin private with a girl. a client assistance plan is used when girls are really strugglingeither repeatedly with the same behavior or something's starting to escalate. and we provide a standardized set of promptsso that the staff can facilitate a real meaningful discussion to formally process what's goingon with girls. and this isn't just what you did but it'sthe thoughts and the feelings and sort of
the motivation behind the behavior so thatwe can get to what was behind it so that we can help her get the skills or coping strategiesto improve maybe next time. the temporary privilege restriction is for when a residentmight be misusing a specific privilege-related item. so maybe, you know, she's supposed to be backfrom the community, if she's in a group home, and she's late for curfew or you might haveto restrict that temporarily. but we really reserve that level of intervention for morecommunity-based group home kind of environments, because, obviously in detention or secure,or even staff secure settings, girls don't really have access to too many privileges.
and the last one is the temporary communityrestriction, and this is really for severe difficulties. and this is when girls are temporarily restrictedfrom participating in activities and all their privileges are temporarily restricted becauseshe's got to do some work, not to punish her, but to say, hey, we need a timeout here, becausesomething is going on that we obviously need to support you with. and so that timeout, sort of that privilegerestriction is the time in which she's supposed to be working on what's going on, talkingwith staff, using the client assistance as a tool and creating a plan to sort of changewhat's happening for her. the most effective
use of the tcr is when the staff are intimatelyinvolved with girls in sort of thinking through what she's going to need to make a differentdecision or to use a different set of skills next time a challenge like that arises. wetalked about the framework of myself, my relationships, and my community earlier, and, again, they'reinterwoven throughout the system. but we also talked about how this is really about changingyour program culture. so here we introduced the theme of the day,or for some programs we suggest that themes are identified weekly. so they're program-specific themes that thecommunity can work on for either a day or a week based on one of the three domains,and the themes are determined in collaboration
between the girls and the staff. and this helps to reinforce the program culture,remain focused on growth, and it really keeps the community moving in the right direction.as an example, in our plainville group home this week's theme was "think before you speak."last week's theme with team work. and so it's just another way to help the communitystay focused and build some cohesion between the girls. since sunday tends to be a timewhen not much is happening in the programs, and girls often report being pretty bored,we developed a concept called "socialistic sunday," which is really just a simple frameworkto help girls focus in on a project that's important to them. this could be an issueof social justice. it could be a community
service project. it could be a debate. youknow, the topics are endless. but it's less about having a personal relation or internalcommunity goal and much more working about a social issue. you know, like jeannette saidearlier, they want to be involved in something meaningful and this framework helps you toreally get that going. we wanted to have an opportunity to make sure girls are being creativetogether and having fun, sort of working towards a common goal. we all know how important itis to make time for girls to talk, both throughout the day and the week, so integrating gatheringsor meetings with the girls can be really helpful. so we encourage the programs to use both amorning and an evening gathering each day with the girls and a weekly community improvementgathering or house meeting, as a lot of programs
have already. but we also have times whenwe need to initiate gatherings because a circumstance requires it. so maybe a new girl is coming in or there'san issue where girls need to process some difficult situations or perhaps a girl isleaving. so with the structure that we've provide inhere, we provide a very formalized agenda, invite the girls to add to it, and the structureof the meeting is all about what the girls want, their opinions, their ideas and thoughts.the staff, their role is facilitator, to make sure that the agenda goes forth, that theystay on topic, they things are recorded, and that everybody has a voice. the staff personin charge is going to talk a whole lot less
than the girls who are in the gathering. and so after these get off the ground, girlsactually enjoy going to them. it's not the dreaded meeting where they have to go andlisten to a lecture. it's actually just the opposite. another component that i think isreally important is sort of in recognition of how incredibly stressful it is to cometo a new place. so the personal coach was really outlinedto help with this transition. we really want her to feel as safe and supported as possiblesoon after she comes to stay with us. so we know that this can help to reduce someof the anxiety to have a point person who is both trained, qualified, and motivatedand wants to be working with girls in this
capacity. another way that we like to supportgirls, and we know that journaling activities can be an activity that's very supportiveand comforting to girls, especially during a transition or change in their daily lifefor them. so the personal coach will give her a tiernotebook and talk with her about how to use it. and this notebook was designed to supportgirls both during her initial days and thereafter. and it has space in the first few pages tomake sure that girls learn the things that she needs to know about the program, writedown her concerns, or also, you know, kind of outline things that might be difficultthat she'd like to talk to the personal coach
about. so in the effort -- i'm looking, i believei might be close to out of time. i want to just really quickly -- i just want to kindof wrap up with my last slide -- and i apologize for going a little bit long -- because thisslide, i think, represents why we're all here and why we're all committed to girls, is torecognize that girls are struggling. and so many of us assume, you know, that actingout behaviors are, like, really purposeful, that they're trying to be defiant, they'retrying to make things difficult for us. but the truth is that there's an underlying reasonwhy girls act out. you know, they may be homesick, or frightened, or ashamed of where they are,or have trouble just fitting in. but we need
to remember that our girls are victims longbefore they come to us. you know, we get a lot of questions about how this model canwork with aggressive girls, and we know that there's a lot of challenges to developinga gender-responsive environment. but we have to remember the difficult lives that girlshave faced before they've ever come to us. if we can remember in the moment, when it'sreally hard that the girl before us is struggling and that she's got a tremendous amount ofstress and pain behind her actions, it's going to make it possible for us to intervene ina way that works best for her. because our goal really isn't or shouldn't be to changeour girls, our job is really to help girls learn adaptive strategies so they can keepthemselves safe. i want to end with a quote
from a girl i spoke to a few weeks ago aboutthe difference between a traditional rule system, the compliance-focused system, andthe tier system. and she said, "the staff stopped groundingus for no reason. we got punished and it made no sense. they started talking to us aboutwhy we did what we did and how we felt about it. it finally seemed like they really trulycare about us." thank you. thank you so much, kim. an excellent presentation. i saw youmoving past some of those great other content slides, but you are right that we are at time. so i'm going to go directly now to invitingour panel for presentation, and what i thought maybe that we'd do, actually, in our discussionis start with that initial topic that you
were bringing up around girls and anger andinvite you to just speak about what do you see related to girls and how they deal withanger and then invite stephanie and jeannette to also add in on that particular topic. sure,i mean i think both jeannette and stephanie talked about it in their presentations. it'sthat they're constantly told that they're supposed to be doing something differentlywith their anger, that it's getting them in trouble or they should be responding differentlyor why are you so angry. and the truth is that we need to completelyshift the way that we're talking with girls about this issue. and so, yes, what we see on the outside isan angry expression of something else deeper,
but until we help her be in a safe place whereshe can actually start to process those feelings and understand that there's something underneaththat anger, we're not really doing her any justice, and we're certainly not going tohelp her figure out how to be more effective when those feelings come up. this is jeannette,and i agree with kim. i would just say, you know, anger, i mean we articulate that weknow anger is a secondary emotion, so we just need to focus on what's causing the angerrather than on the symptoms, so look at the root cause and help them to do that. thisis stephanie, and i think the other thing we should realize when we think about angerand gender is that it's considered okay on some level for boys to be angry, that's normal.but we're often much more critical of girls
who are angry. but i also want to say thatto see it as a symptom. and the other thing about anger is we alsotend to think of it as a negative emotion, and i'd rather think of it as all emotionsare cues to us, they're there to get our attention that something in our life isn't working right,and we need to pay attention to how we're feeling, and anger is just one of those feelingsthat we need to pay attention to. great. thank you very much. i think that you're, you know,thinking about those kinds of pieces and some of the commonalities, this has just been sucha very rich set of presentations, and i love how they build on each other. we have abouteight minutes left, so i'm going to ask some broad questions for the panel to think about.the first one is i’m wondering if you could
each point us to some of what's called thelow-hanging fruit in terms of opportunities, some of the things that people can do easilyto make a difference for girls. one of the things sort of tied to that to think aboutis many of the people who are listening are from community-based organizations and outpatientprograms, so ways that they can help intervene, maybe even before criminal justice involvement. so some of the low-hanging fruits in termof opportunities. i think one of -- this is jeannette. i think one of the things thatwe often don't think about is really simply just talking to girls. i mean i think, youknow, girls do have this need to express themselves and be in dialogue with people, and i thinkthe loss of it is much more about what they
need and what's going on than we give themcredit for. if we come to them with -- not from a one-up-one-down power dynamic but tryto be more of at their level and, you know, showing some genuine concern about what'sgoing on in their lives. this is stephanie. i really want to emphasize, too, what jeannettesaid. i think for agencies in the community is to convene a group of girls and say we'relooking at services of what's missing and what we do have in our community. what doyou think girls need? what do you and you friends think would be important in whatevercommunity that you're working in? i think asking girls is a great idea. i think justeven getting girls on the agenda so that people are thinking about girls, not just youth oradolescents, but what about girls, because
i think then we would make some changes inthe services we provide. uh-huh. and this is kim, i would just add to i thinkthe great ideas of both stephanie and jeannette just shared and talk a little bit about thinkingabout who you're hiring and the attitudes and values of the staff that you have workingwith girls, and are they prepared to really take the time and listen and to demonstratethe relational strength-based skills that we know are most effective when we're workingwith girls. yes, thanks, kim. part of the reason why samhsa, i think, initiated thisgirls matter webinar series is the importance of that workforce development and how manyprograms, which are providing services for girls, it's actually in co-ed settings andthe merit kind of environments. there's one
refugee organization in chicago, which actuallydid a very similar approach, and started talking to the girls that they were seeing. and what they found is that the girls whowere coming in and out of the center and in the community had no girl-like space becausethey lived in other departments. there was no place that they could put girl-like thingsand hang out. and so they just created a venue so that girlscould be girls, is just like one of those example of listening to the girls, and someof the material that you were also speaking to jeannette, yeah, kind of building thatproactive piece. i think we've heard a lot, sort of throughout the webinar series andfrom some of our experts around reaching and
addressing girls in general, and maybe interveninga little bit earlier to addressing some of the substance abuse and behavioral healthand some of the social media challenges. it does also seem that there's a real gap inservices for high-risk girls, and oftentimes they don't really access or get engaged inany service delivery until after they're involved with the juvenile justice system. how do webring their needs to the forefront and expand quality services for girls? and i asked this question knowing that i'mspeaking with three amazing leaders in the efforts to bring attention to the needs ofhigh-risk girls. well, this is jeannette. i think one of the things that we can do,because it's certainly not -- it's something
that's going to take time to get us wherewe need to be as a society, frankly. the importance of building alliance in your local communities,across the state, with like organizations, but also working across systems to createcollaborations and a shared voice around the importance of putting the needs of marginalizedgirls first. you know, i think because girls tend not to act out but to turn their angerand frustration inward, they're able to be invisible for a very long time before theyget the help that they need. so i think it's incumbent on advocates andservice providers and activists to be getting together to talk about it. it's the socialjustice issue, really. this is kim. i just want to add really quickly that i think, youknow, there is this unspoken fear that people
have about working with aggressive or assaultiveor even, really just high-risk girls, and they just often feel very helpless in termsof what they're supposed to do. and i think, you know, they tend to move towardsthe very rule-based, so if we can keep their behavior in check then we can work with them. and i think that those kinds of paradigmsalso have to be examined, because i think, you know, girls are just going to continueto resist that kind of an approach until we figure out how to do better work, talkingwith them and meeting them where they're at. yeah, i would agree with both kim and jeannette,because i do think that as we talk about girls who are the most vulnerable and most at risk,very often they end up in settings or with
people that are really focused on control. and i've watched these high-control paradigmsactually escalate the behavior that people are trying to diminish, so it becomes veryadversarial. and in terms of prevention, i think we needto think about reaching girls as girls in school settings, where they are, and we'vehad very good success with that, believe it or not in nova scotia, in canada, where thehigh schools are running groups for girls, so girls have an opportunity to come togetherand talk about their issues and create connection outside of their sort of classroom friendships,and it's been very powerful, and i think, a very -- it's a place to begin to preventsome of these issues. great. thank you, again,
to all of you. what an incredible presentation. and thank you also to everybody who is listeningto the webinar, for all of the work that you're doing with girls. i'm going to go ahead andclose us. we have some resources that have been in included at the end of the powerpointthat will be posted online, and i also have a couple of important announcements. pleasecomplete a brief satisfaction survey. you will receive an e-mail from go-to webinarin the next hour or so with the link, and it's also being placed in the chat box. notethat it can take an hour, so don't worry if you don't get the link right away. and if for some reason you don't get it, thenyou can e-mail us at gbh@ahpnet.com. the survey
will be available for completion until tuesdayjune 17th. and, again, if you're seeking ceu credits, you must complete it by close ofbusiness on that day. all qualified attendees for today's training will receive an e-mailwith instructions for obtaining your certificates of attendance by july 1st. also, the samhsa -- remember to go to thesamhsa facebook page and let us know some of the work that you're doing around girlsand to keep the conversation alive using #girlsmatter2014. i want to thank our speakers and a specialthank you to sharon amatetti and samhsa. registration is now open, and we hope you will join usfor youth development and girls recovery supports on july 24th.
and thanks again to everyone, and have a wonderfulday.
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