AT-RISK GIRLS TO GET OWN FACILITY

Beginning May 1, troubled teen-age girls will have their own residential
treatment program as Looking Glass Youth and Family Services converts its
current coed space to an all-girls haven.

The 15-bed Evaluation & Treatment Center on River Road now provides
services to youth ages 11 to 17 who are in trouble and are referred by the
courts, the foster care system, mental health services or from families
seeking help, said center Director Phoebe Mae. The average stay at the
center is six to nine months.

When it converts to an all-girls program - the boys will move to two
existing all-male residential facilities - it will be the only one of its
kind in Lane County, Mae said. It was created in part to address the rising
number of at-risk girls and in response to a growing body of research
showing that girls often do better when separated from boys.

While specific numbers were not available Tuesday, Lane County Department
of Youth Services Director Lisa Smith confirmed that more local girls are
getting into trouble.

"We see increasing numbers of girls in the system, and increasing severity
of crimes girls are being charged with," she said.

Programs that deal with girls' specific problems are clearly needed, she
said. Among those problems: the presence of boys.

Treatment center staff see the evidence first-hand - watching girls
actively engaged in a classroom activity clam up when a boy enters the room
or shift their attention from the school work to the boy, Mae said.

"Before they were competing academically. Then the boy comes in, and
they're competing for his attention," she said. "It becomes about how the
boys perceive them."

Until now, girls who required a segregated approach - for example, sexual
abuse victims and sexually aggressive girls - wound up on a waiting list
for all-female treatment centers in Corvallis and Portland, Mae said.

But the new program will offer more than an all-female setting. Looking
Glass staff members also are looking at program changes that reflect new
research, which indicates that treatment designed for boys don't always
work well for girls, Mae said.

Looking Glass is getting help from Melissa Dunn, a consultant from North
Carolina who is in Eugene this week to help the county youth services
agency re-evaluate its programs for girls. The assistance is financed by a
grant from the U.S. Department of Juvenile Justice.

The current models for youth programs all grew out of criminal justice and
rehabilitation studies in the 1970s that were based on how boys responded,
said Dunn, who has worked with criminal justice and youth agencies for the
past 14 years.

"Research has borne out that these approaches are not as effective with
girls and young women because they learn and develop differently," Dunn said.

A typical example is the anger management classes often prescribed for kids
in trouble, Dunn said.

Although it can be effective to teach boys that they can't express their
anger in ways that harm other people, such an approach must be changed to
work with girls, Dunn said. Between 60 percent and 90 percent of at-risk
girls are abuse victims who carry the added burden that even feeling anger
is inappropriate, Dunn said

"When I do group work with girls, I do a pressure cooker metaphor," she
said. "If you don't put the valve on the pot that releases the steam, what
happens? The pot explodes.

"These girls have all these stresses, and it's all going on inside. You
turn up the heat with victimization, with peer problems, with stress in the
family, experimentation with drugs and alcohol ... there's this internal
seething anger. For girls it's about first honoring the anger as a valid
emotion, then going on to how to express that emotion."

Boys tend to be more task-oriented, Dunn said. They respond to roles and
structure more easily than girls.

"Boys tend to look at the world, survey the territory and go from point A
to point B," Dunn said. "And if he's not going to do it, he's going to tell
you."

Girls, on the other hand, tend to identify their sense of self through
relationships, Dunn said. Programs that fail to deal with underlying
relationships don't reach girls.

Dunn will return in several months to help implement new programs still in
the design stage, said Smith, the agency director.

For now, the most visible of the changes is at Looking Glass, where the
heavy blue curtains in the boys' rooms are being swapped out for frillier
white ones. But more important, said Smith, will be the internal changes.

"I would like to see it provide these at-risk girls with a safe nurturing
environment where they feel comfortable, where they have the support to
deal with the difficult issues they're facing," she said.