At-Risk Youth Social Work Case Study

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At-risk youth social work implications vary depending on gender. Many females and males differ on coping with stress from maladaptive psychological or emotional behaviors. As we learned previously, males will cope by externalizing their behavior whereas females will internalize their behavior. Both male and females experience anger, yet girl’s anger resorts to feelings of guilt, depression, and anxiety, which reduces their chance to direct crime. This explains the gender gap we see in men vs women crimes. Males are involved with 63% of the 2.2 million juvenile arrests in the official arrest data, but the gender gap is continuing to grow even larger for juvenile violent crimes, property crimes, and drug abuse violations. Girls who have gone to a juvenile detention center were arrested for less serious crimes such as running away from home (59%) and prostitution (69%) (Maschi, Bradley, & Hatcher 2008). …show more content…
Dealing with at-risk youth, social workers have to take into account which gender they are dealing with because both are socialized according to their gender on how to cope with emotions. Acknowledging gender differences in how youth express emotions to child maltreatment has important implications for early identification and intervention, which schools, juvenile justice residential, secure care settings help identify behaviors needing to be addressed. Self-Esteem and trust concerns occur for both genders, particularly more so for girls since findings indicate that their internalizing behavior among females has long-term effects on externalizing