Stigma, Penalty and Black British Young Women: Historicizing Child Q

The Child Q case resounds a history rife with intersecting, hidden gendered stigma and penalty for Black, racialized young British women. Child Q’s experience offers an opportunity to explore critical race theorist (CRT) Kimberlé Crenshaw’s logic of the unique deficit positioning, where race and gender coincide, overlap, and compound the pains of historic inequality. The case offers an opportunity to expand the customary contemporary focus on the racialization of punishment beyond concerns with disproportionate criminality to explore logics concerned with youth’s entrenched, disproportionately inequal positioning. The case exemplifies how racial stigma sutures penalty, instead of care and lenience, into racialized young women’s lives.