Oppressed groups aren’t always infantilised – in a process known as ‘adultification’, children from racialised minorities are typically viewed as having more agency, which makes them more likely to be criminalised– but the right is happy to deploy a diversity of tactics.

12See Goff, supra note 1. Note that the term “adultification” is sometimes used to refer to a distinct phenomenon in which children who are assigned adult responsibilities behave in ways that are more adult-like than their peers. For purposes of this report, adultification refers to adults’ generalized perception of Black girls as more adult, without reference to their individual behaviors.

Adultification Can Take Two Essential Forms: 1.A process of socialization, in which chil dren function at a more mature devel opmental stage because of situational context and necessity, especially in low-resource community environments;23 and 2.A social or cultural stereotype that is based on how adults perceive children “in the absence of knowledge of chil dren’s behavior and verbalizations.24 This latter form of adultification, which is based in part on race,25 is the subject of this report. Scholars ha

Research has shown that Black boys, in particular, are often perceived as less innocent and more adult than their white male peers and, as a result, they are more likely to be assigned greater culpability for their actions, which increases their risk of contact with the juvenile justice system.11 This report refers to this phenomenon, which effectively reduces or removes the consideration of childhood as a mediating factor in Black youths’ behavior, as “adultification”.

This report represents a key step in addressing the disparate treatment of Black girls in public systems. We challenge researchers to develop new studies to investigate the degree and prevalence of the adultification of Black girls—a term used in this report to refer to the perception of Black girls as less innocent and more adult-like than white girls of the same age—as well as its possible causal connection with negative outcomes across a diverse range of public systems, including education, juvenile justice, and child welfare.