Jane Doe

Jane Doe is the 16 year old Latino trans-girl who is in the custody of Connecticut’s Department of Children and Family (DCF). While she has been in DCF custody she has been sexually assaulted over a dozen times by the staff and by the other residents, before that she was prostituted by her family members. She suffers from trauma and PTSD and she has been bounced around from one therapist to another therapist for a total of five therapists and has never been with one long enough to have a working relationship with one.

She has been put in solitary confinement at an adult women’s prison and held without any charges filed against her. She was then put in the Pueblo Detention Facility for Girls where she got into a fight with three other girls they put her in the boys' Connecticut Juvenile Training School and once again in solitary confinement “for her own protection.” She was supposed to go to a facility in Massachusetts that specializes in children with trauma and PTSD but that was cancelled after the incident at Pueblo.

The Hartford Courant had a editorial yesterday that said,

What a woefully one-dimensional account the state Department of Children and Families has spun in steering transgender teen Jane Doe's heartbreaking trip through the juvenile justice system.

The state agency has singled out her conduct for public dissemination, without putting it in context, according to the state's advocate for children. Any minor, no matter how troublesome, deserves better from her legal caretaker.
[…]
Ms. Eagan [the State Child Advocate] is on the money in calling DCF's treatment of the 16-year-old a "public shaming" and "inexplicable," considering that the other girls were not named. Why publicize only a "fraction" of an incident, as Ms. Eagan called it?

Last week the New Haven Register also published an editorial on how DCF is handling the Jane Doe case,

The Connecticut Department of Children and Families has an annual budget of $900 million. It has more than 3,200 full-time employees.

It successfully lobbied for state funding for the creation of a secure, locked facility in Middletown to house girls who represented the “most difficult” cases.

It is led by a commissioner with an incredible resume. Joette Katz left the Connecticut Supreme Court to lead the agency.

Yet DCF is flummoxed by the case of a single 16-year-old girl. Not, we would argue, because she’s the worst-behaved kid they’ve ever dealt with, but because she is transgender.
[…]
It’s not because of her symptoms — plenty of kids who get bounced around among foster homes and institutions lash out and assault others. It’s because they don’t know what to do with, or don’t understand, or don’t want to go out of their way to help, a transgender child.

And the editorial goes on to lay the blame right where it belongs…

The Connecticut Department of Children and Families’ treatment of Jane Doe has been cruel and unusual, and it’s in response to problems in her behavior that were caused in large part by its own negligence.

There will be a rally for Jane Doe this afternoon in front of the DCF headquarters at 505 Hudson St. and it is a 5:30pm.