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This book offers a critical analysis of girls’ and women’s experiences in the justice system, from their initial contact with law enforcement to their interaction with prosecutors, judges, and other court officials. Examining the gendered organization of the justice system is an essential step towards gender equity and effective practice in diverse legal settings. This includes recognition of the way women’s intersecting identities influence their perception and experience of the law and the justice system. This book discusses the way gender intersects with race, class, and sexual orientation in ways that impact the legal status and psychological, behavioral, and economic well-being of diverse girls and women. It examines the way social norms regarding the rights of girls and women influence policies and procedures in multiple arenas of the justice system and highlights the role of psychology and helping professionals in shaping legal policy. Each chapter provides a summary of the research on specific female populations in diverse arenas of the justice system; outlines practical implications for training and interventions grounded in psychological research; and formulates new organizing principles for working with diverse women and girls in legal settings.

There are numerous and trenchant accounts of the tragic and disastrous Iraq War (2003–2011), which focus on its financial, human, and political cost to the US. Less has been written about the human cost to the Iraqi people in the largest displacement in the Middle East since 1948. Few Americans are cognizant that over three million Iraqis, many facing violence due to their cooperation with the US invasion and occupation, fled Iraq and that 124,159 were resettled in the US from 2008 to 2015 after an intense lobbying effort by former aid personnel and veterans. This ethnographic study explores the cartography of belonging for Iraqi refugees within a specific cultural geography—California’s Latinx-majority communities of southeastern California (known as the Inland Empire). The fieldwork in the IE spans a particular geopolitical era of resettlement mobilization, the Great Recession, and the December 2, 2015, terrorist attack in San Bernardino. The attack was immediately followed by candidate Donald Trump’s naming of Arab and Muslim refugees (including Iraqis) as threats to national security. With the mainstreaming of Islamophobia during the presidential election, the United States ceased to be a free space of religious and communal expression. Drawing on seven years of fieldwork with fifty Iraqi refugees, this book is a witness to how the felt sense of belonging—cultural citizenship—is negotiated within the social spaces of work, family, faith community.

In this book, I argue that successful community-based civic activities after a catastrophic event may generate vulnerable resilience, a state in which active neighborhood recovery efforts escalate the city’s susceptibility to future risks. I contend that while local communities exert a considerable influence on post-disaster recovery, they do so in a more complicated way than what previous research has hitherto suggested. Instead of casting uniformly positive effects, I argue, civic capacity presents both opportunities and challenges with regard to overcoming crises and building resilience in a city. On the one hand, the civic capacity of communities can help people concentrate resources on restoring damages and facilitate reconstruction immediately after disaster. In this sense, strong civic capacity is closely associated with community resilience. On the other hand, the same capacity and sense of belonging and empowerment may also reinforce challenges that can ultimately undermine the city’s resilience. While the civic capacity of communities may facilitate revitalization in a smaller spatial scale of neighborhoods, the collective pursuit of recovery and rebuilding tends to generate conflicts at the city level. As civic actors continue to request protection and pursue development in the city’s unsafe areas, as was the case in New Orleans, certain sections of the city may generate greater vulnerabilities than before, distancing themselves from the communities that have led sustainable, resilient redevelopment during the same period. This haphazard spatial recovery compromises the city’s ability to mitigate future disasters and reduce urban inequality.