Girls of Color Face Disproportionately Harsh Discipline at School #BlackGirlsMatter

New Report from Columbia Law School's Center for Intersectionality and Social Policy Studies Recommends Including Girls of Color in Policies to End School-to-Prison Pipeline

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New York, February 4, 2015—Girls of color face much harsher school discipline than their white peers but are excluded from current efforts to address the school-to-prison pipeline, according to a new report issued today by Columbia Law School’s Center for Intersectionality and Social Policy Studies and the African American Policy Forum.  

The report, Black Girls Matter: Pushed Out, Overpoliced and Underprotected, is based on a new review of national data and personal interviews with young women in Boston and New York. 

“As public concern mounts for the needs of men and boys of color through initiatives like the White House’s My Brother’s Keeper, we must challenge the assumption that the lives of girls and women—who are often left out of the national conversation—are not also at risk,” said Columbia Law School Professor Kimberlé Crenshaw, the report’s lead author and the director of the Center for Intersectionality and Social Policy Studies.

Crenshaw, a leading authority in how law and society are shaped by race and gender, argues that an intersectional approach encompassing how related identity categories such as race, gender, and class overlap to create inequality on multiple levels is necessary to address the issue of school discipline and the school-to-prison pipeline.

#BlackGirlsMatter

Read more online at Columbia University or African American Policy Forum, Inc.