Stigma, Discrimination, and Collateral Consequences In Help-Seeking and Help-Attainment Processes for Justice-Impacted Women

The criminal legal system impacts millions of women in the United States, with social workers positioned at critical junctures within and adjacent to the criminal legal system. Notably, the criminal legal system disproportionately criminalizes and punishes women who are Black, Indigenous, and/or Latine, impoverished, transgender and/or gender queer, disabled, and lesbian, gay, bisexual, or queer, as this system operates as a form of racialized, gendered social control. Even after formal criminal legal system involvement, millions of women in the United States live with the overhanging shadow of prior involvement in the criminal legal system. They commonly experience stigma, discrimination, and collateral consequences when seeking services for housing, employment, and basic needs. The long-term negative consequences of criminal-legal involvement are further exacerbated by systemic racism and misogyny. The study of the impacts of these consequences is evolving and requires research examining how aspects of women’s lives are impacted even beyond formal system involvement.

Justice-impacted women experience high prevalence rates of behavioral health concerns and interpersonal violence victimization yet have low rates of engagement with behavioral health treatment and victimization support services. There is limited scholarship regarding how stigma, discrimination, and collateral consequences impact help-seeking and help-attainment processes for justice-impacted women. In order to guide the improvement of linkages to care for women, this roundtable will explore the question of how stigma, discrimination, and collateral consequences shape justice-impacted women’s help-seeking and help-attainment processes for behavioral health treatment and victimization services and will present evidence that collateral consequences specific to behavioral health and victimization services impact women.

The roundtable presenters will focus on specific areas of women’s help-seeking and help-attainment processes. The presenters will discuss results from an explanatory sequential mixed methods research study focused on justice-impacted women’s experiences that includes survey data from 491 justice-impacted women and interview data from 50 justice-impacted women. One presenter will discuss barriers in women’s help-seeking and help-attainment processes for behavioral health treatment, including those related to having a history of criminal legal system involvement and forms of stigmatized treatment that excluded them from specific forms of treatment. This presenter will also discuss facilitating factors that women shared, including specific dynamics of non-stigmatizing treatment. Another presenter will detail experiences of stigma related to race, gender, and criminal legal status, and how this stigma is associated with women’s feelings of restricted autonomy in service trajectories. A third presenter will focus on coercive dynamics experienced by women in behavioral health and victimization services, specifically how success is framed, how women’s perspectives in services are stigmatized, and how women learn to navigate expectations and fulfill requirements that are system-driven, but not in alignment with women’s goals.

This roundtable will invite discussion that furthers the identification of how stigma, discrimination, and collateral consequences impact women’s experiences of behavioral health treatment and victimization support services. In addition, the discussion will include ways of furthering research and practice to eliminate and mitigate these dynamics and their impacts.