Profile Updated:
Summary: This is a community-based, trauma-informed advocacy intervention for girls 11 to 17 years old who are at risk for, or already involved in, the juvenile justice system. The program is rated Promising for reducing aggression/hostility and for improving attendance. (Review the full program description).
| Title | Rating | Details | Outcome Category | Study(ies) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Aggression/hostility |
Promising | One Study |
In the 3 months post-intervention, a smaller percentage of girls in the treatment group who participated in Resilience, Opportunity, Safety, Education, Strength (ROSES) reported engaging in a physical fight, compared with girls in the comparison group. This difference was statistically significant. |
Juvenile Problem and Protective Behaviors; Antisocial behaviors; Aggression/hostility | Javdani, Shabnam. 2020. “Reducing Crime for Girls in the Juvenile Justice System Through Researcher–Practitioner Partnerships.” Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, National Institute of Justice. See evaluation methods. |
| Attendance |
Promising |
In the 3 months post-intervention, girls in the treatment group who participated Resilience, Opportunity, Safety, Education, Strength (ROSES) missed fewer days of school, compared with girls in the comparison group. This difference was statistically significant. |
Education; Attendance | Javdani, Shabnam. 2020. “Reducing Crime for Girls in the Juvenile Justice System Through Researcher–Practitioner Partnerships.” Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, National Institute of Justice. See evaluation methods. |
Program Goals/Target Population
Resilience, Opportunity, Safety, Education, Strength (ROSES) is a community-based, trauma-informed, gender-responsive advocacy intervention for girls 11 to 17 years old who are at risk for or already involved in the juvenile justice system. The program (formerly called the Girls Advocacy Project [GAP]) uses an advocacy framework that focuses on girls’ strengths (rather than their deficits) and aims to increase girls’ access to community resources and make the community (which includes the systems in which girls are involved in) more responsive to their needs. The goal of the program is to strengthen girls’ contexts (e.g., school, family, peers) in a way to promote their positive development and decrease their engagement with risk-enhancing contexts. Contexts can include informal (e.g., peer, family) and formal (e.g., school, juvenile justice system, child welfare).
Key Personnel
The ROSES intervention involves a university–community partnership. The intervention is implemented by advocates, who are advanced undergraduate students from a local university. Advocates complete an intensive, 40-hour manualized ROSES advocacy training and attend weekly in-person advocacy supervision meetings. They work alongside girls, in the girls’ home communities.
Program Components
ROSES uses an individualized, strengths-based, and multilevel approach. The program is 10 to 12 weeks long. Advocates meet with their assigned clients in the community twice a week and engage in advocacy work for about 10 hours each week.
The advocacy work involves four phases. During the first phase, the assessment phase, advocates get to know their clients and gather information about the girls’ lives, goals, and contexts (e.g., peer dynamics). This information helps advocates determine and understand what goals the clients want to accomplish during the program (such as improving grades in school, successfully completing probation, or joining a sports team). The second phase begins with advocates collaboratively identifying areas of clients’ unmet needs and assembling a variety of resources tailored to meet these needs. During this process, the clients select which resources to contact, and advocates help the clients make phone calls, arrange in-person meetings, and identify important individuals who could improve their chances of accessing the resources they need. In the third phase, advocates and clients work together to identify and assemble new formal and informal resources that could also meet the clients’ needs. In the final phase, advocates work on efforts to transfer “self-advocacy” skills. They transfer skills and knowledge about advocacy to their clients and encourage the girls to take a more active role in their own advocacy. This phase includes a psychoeducational component, in which advocates instruct the girls on the phases and philosophy of advocacy. There is also an active component in which the girls become more involved in aspects of the program (planning and leading meetings with probation officers or writing their own letters to the juvenile court).
The advocacy phases could be engaged in simultaneously. For example, assessment of unmet needs could continue for the duration of the program, and transfer of self-advocacy skills could begin during the first contact between advocates and their clients.
The program also incorporates trauma-informed principles, such as a promotion of safety (by attending to victimization risk and safety planning); trustworthiness (by holding advocates accountable to high standards set by the program); choice (by supporting multiple solutions to meeting girls’ goals and needs); collaboration (by involving girls in the directing and planning of the intervention), and empowerment (by following a rights-based model that asserts each girl has a right to positive youth development) [Javdani and Allen, 2016].
Program Theory
Two theoretical frameworks guide the elements of the ROSES program. The first theoretical framework is ecological theory (Bronfenbrenner, 1992), which asserts that multiple levels of analyses shape human behavior (such as individual biology and social environments like school or family). ROSES was designed to intervene with girls’ proximal social environments, to change conditions of their lives with the aim of decreasing certain risk factors and increasing protective factors (Javdani and Allen, 2016).
The second theoretical framework is empowerment theory, which asserts that individuals, groups, and communities experience greater well-being when they have more control over their lives (Rappaport, 1981). Disenfranchised groups (specifically youth and girls) often do not have decisionmaking control over certain parts of their lives that directly affect them. In ROSES, girls have decisionmaking authority regarding the focus of the intervention and the specific direction the intervention will take (Javdani and Allen, 2016).
Study Title: Reducing Crime for Girls in the Juvenile Justice System through Researcher-Practitioner Partnerships (which is associated with outcomes Aggression/hostility and Attendance )
Javdani (2020) conducted a randomized controlled trial to examine the efficacy of the Resilience, Opportunity, Safety, Education, Strength (ROSES) intervention. The study consisted of two phases. The first phase involved in-depth interviews with multiple stakeholders within and outside the local Division of Youth and Family Justice of New York City, to better understand the challenges and strategies for reducing girls’ crime. The second phase was the randomized controlled trial of adolescent girls randomly assigned to receive the ROSES intervention, compared with a sample of girls randomly assigned to the control group who did not receive the ROSES intervention. The CrimeSolutions review of this study focused on the second phase.
Girls were eligible to participate in the study if they were 11 to 17 years old, lived in New York City, and had a history of juvenile legal system involvement or were at risk for juvenile legal system involvement. Girls were considered at risk if they had previous contact with police or were absent from school in a way that indicated excessive absenteeism or truancy, based on New York City standards (the study authors did not define the standards). A total of 314 girls were screened for eligibility; of these, 57 could not participate. In total, 123 girls were randomly assigned to the ROSES intervention group, and 130 girls were randomly assigned to the control group.
The average age of girls in the ROSES intervention group was 14.6 years (ages ranged from 12 to 17). The ROSES intervention group was 44.9 percent Hispanic or Latina, 42.1 percent Black, 5.6 percent Asian, 5.6 percent “Other,” and 1.9 percent American Indian or Alaska Native. The highest proportion of intervention group girls (31.1 percent) were in grades 5–8, 24.5 percent were in 9th grade, 22.6 percent were in 10th grade, 14.2 percent were in 11th grade, and 5.7 percent were in 12th grade. The average age of girls in the control group was 14.5 years. The control group was 52.3 percent Hispanic or Latina, 38.3 percent Black, 3.7 percent American Indian or Alaska Native, 3.7 percent “Other,” and 1.9 percent Asian. The highest proportion of control group girls (35.8 percent) were in grades 5–8, 24.5 percent were in 9th grade, 18.9 percent were in 10th grade, 17.0 percent were in 11th grade, and 3.8 percent were in 12th grade. There were no statistically significant differences between the groups with regard to baseline demographics.
Assessments were conducted at baseline, mid-intervention (6 weeks postbaseline), post-intervention, and at a 3-month follow-up. The study examined the intervention’s effects on violence and delinquency, substance use and risk taking, and mental health and well-being (the CrimeSolutions review of this study focused on measures related to violence and delinquency, specifically outcomes of engaging in a physical fight, and status offending measured as truancy/average days of school missed). Engaging in a physical fight was measured by the Risk Behavior Surveillance Survey, and average number of missed school days was measured by the Self-Reported Offending Scale.
The data were analyzed with a combination of multivariate analysis of covariance (MANCOVA), analysis of covariance (ANCOVA), and repeated measures of analysis of variance (ANOVA) to examine the extent to which outcomes demonstrated differences between the intervention and control groups over time. No subgroup analysis was conducted.
Citation:
Javdani, Shabnam. 2020. “Reducing Crime for Girls in the Juvenile Justice System Through Researcher–Practitioner Partnerships.” Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, National Institute of Justice.
Advocates who implement the Resilience, Opportunity, Safety, Education, Strength (ROSES) intervention are advanced undergraduate students from a large university. In the study by Javdani and Daneau (2020), there were 106 advocates who completed a 40-hour manualized ROSES advocacy training and attended weekly in-person advocacy supervision meetings with the principal investigator. The advocate training adhered to a mastery model. Training topics included the science of disruptive behavior and risk for juvenile legal system involvement; historical and sociocultural context of girls’ pathways from home; and understanding the multilayered motivation for girls’ behavior. Training was also provided in adolescent development, crisis response skills, safety and mandatory reporting, and empathy and active listening skills (Javdani and Daneau, 2020).
More information about ROSES can be found at the program’s website: https://wp.nyu.edu/rise/roses/
These sources were used in the development of the program profile:
Battered Women’s Justice Project. 2016. The ROSES Program: Applying Evidence-Based Models of Advocacy Intervention With Girls. St. Paul, Minn.: Battered Women’s Justice Project.
Bronfenbrenner, U. 1992. “Ecological Systems Theory.” In R. Basta (ed.), Annals of Child Development–Six Theories of Child Development: Revised Formulations and Current Issues. Greenwich, CT: JAI Press, p. 187–250.
Javdani, Shabnam, and Nicole E. Allen. 2016. “An Ecological Model for Intervention for Juvenile Justice–Involved Girls: Development and Preliminary Prospective Evaluation.” Feminist Criminology 11(2):135–62.
Javdani, Shabnam, Sukhmani Singh, and Corianna E. Sichel. 2017. “Negotiating Ethical Paradoxes in Conducting a Randomized Controlled Trial: Aligning Intervention Science With Participatory Values.” American Journal of Community Psychology 60(3–4):439–49.
Rappaport, J. 1981. “In Praise of Paradox: A Social Policy of Empowerment Over Prevention.” American Journal of Community Psychology 9:1–25.
Singh, Sukhamni, Megan Granski, Maria del Pilar Victoria, and Shabnam Javdani. 2018. “The Praxis of Decoloniality in Researcher Training and Community-Based Data Collection.” American Journal of Community Psychology 62:385–95.
This program was originally rated Promising. It has been re-reviewed based on the change in the program rating instrument. Under the new instrument, CrimeSolutions ow now rates individual program outcomes and no longer assigns an overall rating.
Rating Process
Program Status
This program is Active.