Hidden In Carceral Sight: A Qualitative Examination of Sexual Violence in Youth Detention
2022-07
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Hidden In Carceral Sight: A Qualitative Examination of Sexual Violence in Youth Detention
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2022-07
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State-sanctioned sexual violence has long plagued the criminal punishment system, from the rape and lynching of Black men and women during Jim Crow, to the sexual exploitation of Native youth in U.S. boarding schools in the early 20th century. This sexual exploitation of criminalized communities continues today through the mass incarceration of millions of men, women, trans, and gender non-binary people of color under the carceral state. While sociological scholarship has neglected sexual abuse against all incarcerated communities, the impact of sexual victimization on the 48,000 youth warehoused in juvenile, adult, and immigration detention centers remains particularly troubling given the power structures that shape their coexisting status both as children and as incarcerated persons. Despite the recent closing of several youth detention centers and the implementation of the Prison Rape Elimination Act (PREA), both punishment scholarship on incarceration and feminist research on sexual violence have overlooked youth confinement as a site of state sexual violence and rape law mobilization. Drawing on punishment, critical legal, and intersectional feminist scholarship, my three-paper dissertation, Hidden in Carceral Sight: A Qualitative Examination of Sexual Violence in Youth Detention examines how carceral institutions that house youth (re)produce, construct, and respond to youth claims of sexual misconduct. I further explore how structures of gender, race, and sexuality shape these institutional processes. To answer these questions, I conducted 76 interviews with legal actors, including 23 formerly incarcerated men, women, and trans survivors, and 53 PREA personnel (i.e., compliance managers, investigators, etc.), youth correctional workers, sexual assault advocates, and anti-prison activists across the U.S. I triangulate interviews with a textual analysis of roughly 150 legal documents (e.g., written sexual harassment and abuse investigations, lawsuits, congressional testimonies), news media articles, PREA resources (e.g., webinars, handbooks, etc.), virtual observations of PREA-related events, and secondary survey data from the National Survey of Youth in Custody (NSYC) and the Survey of Sexual Victimization (SSV). Together, these data provide an in-depth analysis of how incarcerated youth experience sexual violence, the cultural and institutional barriers that hinder their disclosure, and how carceral institutions construct and respond to their claims of sexual victimization.
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University of Minnesota Ph.D. dissertation. July 2022. Major: Sociology. Advisor: Christopher Uggen. 1 computer file (PDF); x, 205 pages.
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Powell, Amber. (2022). Hidden In Carceral Sight: A Qualitative Examination of Sexual Violence in Youth Detention. Retrieved from the University Digital Conservancy, https://hdl.handle.net/11299/243122.
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