Despite the numerous differences between boys and girls in the juvenile justice system, there are currently no gender-responsive risk/needs assessments for system-impacted girls, thereby limiting agencies to the use of gender-neutral risk/needs assessments. This article examines commonly used gender-neutral risk/needs assessments and illustrates how these instruments are not truly “neutral.” We argue that predictive validity is not enough to demonstrate effectiveness; these tools can harm and possibly discriminate against girls by placing them in similarly labeled risk categories (i.e., high, medium, low) as boys, despite engaging in less delinquency. This practice of force-fitting girls to assessments primarily developed for boys results in over- and misclassification of girls’ risk and fails to capture their gendered needs and resilience. We see this as an opportunity to reconsider risk assessments altogether for girls and propose a resilience/needs assessment may be better suited to identify girls’ needs and predict future behavior.

尽管少年司法系统中男孩和女孩之间存在许多差异，但目前尚无针对受系统影响的女孩的性别敏感风险/需求评估，从而限制了机构使用性别中立的风险/需求评估。本文研究了常用的性别中立风险/需求评估，并说明了这些工具是不是真正的“中立”。我们认为预测有效性不足以证明有效性。这些工具尽管将青少年的犯罪程度降低了，但通过将其置于与男孩类似的标签风险类别（即，高，中，低）中，可以伤害甚至歧视女孩。这种强迫女孩适应主要为男孩制定的评估的做法导致对女孩风险的过度和错误归类，并且未能抓住女孩的性别需求和韧性。