Complicated Lives: Girls, Parents, Drugs, and Juvenile Justice
Complicated Lives focuses on the lives of sixty-five drug-using girls in the juvenile justice system (living in group homes, a residential treatment center, and a youth correctional facility) who grew up in families characterized by parental drug use, violence, and child maltreatment. Dr. Lopez situates girls’ relationships with parents who fail to live up to idealized parenting norms and examines how these relationships change over time, and ultimately contribute to the girls’ future drug use and involvement in the justice system. While her subjects express concerns and doubt in their chances for success, Dr. Lopez provides an optimistic prescription for reform and improvement of the lives of these young women and presents a number of suggestions ranging from enhanced cultural competency training for all juvenile justice professionals to developing stronger collaborations between youth and adult serving systems and agencies.
About:
Vera Lopez is a professor of justice and social inquiry in the School of Social Transformation at Arizona State University. She received an MA in Program Evaluation and a PhD in School Psychology from the University of Texas at Austin. She also completed a one-year child clinical research internship at the University of Illinois at Chicago, a two-year NIMH-funded research postdoctoral fellowship at ASU's Prevention Research Center (now REACH Institute), and a clinical internship at the Arizona Department of Juvenile Correction's Black Canyon Correctional School for girls. In 2009, Lopez was selected from a national competition to be a visiting scholar at the University of Houston's Center for Mexican American Studies where she spent the 2009-2010 academic year conducting research on Mexican American girls' relationship power, trust, and infidelity.
