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Visions of Justice VII: View The News Journal Article

Visions of Justice VII: Girl Trouble

April 21, 2006

More than one hundred people came together for the seventh annual Visions of Justice forum on April 21, 2006 at University of Delaware’s Clayton Hall. This event, co-sponsored by SURJ, the Delaware Center for Justice, the League of Women Voters, and the Delaware Coalition Against Domestic Violence featured the award-winning documentary, Girl Trouble. The film details the lives of three girls caught up in San Francisco’s juvenile justice system and demonstrates the difficulty the girls have "getting out of the system." (For more information about the film visit: www.girltrouble.org.)

[Photo above] Chief Judge Chandlee Kuhn, Nancy Pearsall and Paulette Sullivan Moore discuss the film and how it relates to girls in Delaware's juvenile justice system.

Co-producer and director, Lexi Leban, introduced the film. After volunteering with the Center for Young Women’s Development in San Francisco, she decided to film a year in the life of three of the girls she met at the center. After four years of filming, Girl Trouble was completed in 2004. Since its introduction, the film has won numerous awards and has been used as a vehicle for public education about girls in the juvenile justice system.

After the film, a panel of distinguished Delaware speakers discussed how the film related to the experiences of girls in Delaware and stressed the need for gender-specific programming in Delaware’s juvenile justice system. The panel included: The Honorable Chandlee J. Kuhn, Chief Judge of Family Court; Nancy Pearsall, Director of Youth Rehabilitative Services for the Department of Children, Youth and their Families; and, Paulette Sullivan Moore, Policy Coordinator for the Delaware Coalition Against Domestic Violence.