Stoneleigh Fellow Leslie Acoca is featured in The Chronicle of Social Change as Girls Health Screen is adopted by the Los Angeles County Probation Department.
On any given day, Los Angeles County Probation’s juvenile division supervises between 180 to 200 girls in its juvenile camps and halls. Soon, those girls in the county’s probation facilities will be able to receive health and emotional services that are tailored to their needs through the use of a unique medical screening tool called the Girls Health Screen (GHS), the nation’s only evidence-based health screen designed for young women. Because more boys are in juvenile facilities than girls, reform efforts and programming in the justice system have tended to be aimed at boys and men. And the unique health and emotional needs of girls have been largely ignored. Enter the Girl’s Health Screen, which was developed by the National Girls Health & Justice Institute in response to those unfilled needs, according to the organization’s founder, Leslie Acoca, who designed and created the screening tool.
