Saturday, February 28, 2009

I spent the last 2 days in a very interesting training for Girls Circle. I hope to be leading a Girls Circle in the near future through work. It really helped that the 2 trainors were great! Women from all over the county attended. I laughed so much during the last 2 days!! Girls Circle is a structured support group for girls to help foster self-esteem, help girls mainttain connection with peers and adult women in their comunity, and counter trends toward self-doubt and allow for sel-expression thourgh verbal sharing and creative activity. Girls are allowed to voice their opinions in a safe enviorment with a facilitator guiding them. this model has been used in juvenile probation, schools, peer led leadership, schools, athletics, pregnacy prevention, gang prevention and any where girls come together. I am very excited about this!!

We were shown some scary statistics on children.
93% of youth sexual assault victims knew their attackers, 34.2% were fammily memebers,58.7% were acquaintances. only 7 % were strangers.
Girls are 3 times more likely than boys to have experiences sexual abuse, which is often an underlying factor in high risk behaviors which lead to deliquency.
Girls show signs of depression at a rate of 50% higher than that of boys. in 2000, suicide was the 3rd leading cause of death among 10-24 year olds.
42% of girls who were victims of violent crimes were victimized by other girls.
1 of 10 adolescent girls report an incident of dating violence in the past year.
roughly 1 in 50 youth injure themselves by deliberatley cutting their own skin, most of them are girls.
Girls are the fastes growing segment of the juvenile justice population.
girls account for 33% of arrests for assault
3 out of every 5 arrest, for running away from home are girls,
66.7% of young women in CA. Youth Authority reported ongoing physical abuse and 44.7% reported sexual abuse.
32% of children reside in single parent households.
34% of births are to unmarried women
Single mothers households comprise by far the poores demographic group
16.3 %(that is more than 11.5 million) of children live in poverty. of that percentage African Americans 32% and Hispanice 28%.

2 comments:

Lynne said...

Sounds like something wonderful to be part of and very needed! And may I say thank you for what you are doing! Thank you!

Loida of the 2L3B's said...

I admire your dedication to provide assistance to those poor girls. It really saddened me to realize the fate of those girls being a victim of such evils. You're such a kind person to volunteer for such a great cause. May the Girls Circle continue to flourish.