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Girl Gangs
by Brett Schaeffer, 01.22.04
"What's attractive about the gang is that it has a lot to do with power." |
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A baby is torn from its mother's arms and thrown to the ground. One girl is smacked with a baseball bat. And more than a dozen other girls are harassed, bullied, and beaten. But their attackers aren't strangers — they're gang members, and this is their way of initiating these women into their gang.
Girl gangs have their own codes and their own brand of intimidation. And these gangs are more prevalent than you might think. According to a study published in 2000 by the National Youth Gang Center, nearly 10 percent of all gang members in the country are girls.
The Cause
"Most gang girls grow up in economically marginalized neighborhoods," write professors Meda Chesney-Lind and John M. Hagedorn in Female Gangs in America. "Poverty, violence, and victimization take on special meaning in girls' lives, and many of these themes emerge in girls' choices to join gangs."
Chesney-Lind, a professor at the University of Hawaii, has studied girl gang members for more than a decade. According to one of her reports, almost two-thirds of girl gang members interviewed in Hawaii had been sexually abused at home. "Many had run away and had joined gangs to obtain protection from abusive families," she notes.
"There is one aspect of female gang life that does not seem to be changing — the gang as a refuge for young women who have been victimized at home," says Hagedorn, an associate professor in the Department of Criminal Justice at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
In other cases, girls may have witnessed abuse, notes Rachel Sing. Sing is the chief program officer for Girls, Inc., of Alameda County, California, an affiliate of the national nonprofit Girls Incorporated, based in New York. "It could be domestic violence directed against someone else," she says. Whatever the case, Sing says the bottom line is that the home environment of most girls who become gang members is not "safe and comfortable."
Getting Out
Sing and her colleagues provide counseling programs and educational opportunities for mostly African-American and Latina teenage girls. Many of these girls are in the juvenile justice system and are involved in gangs.
"What's attractive about the gang is that it has a lot to do with power," says Sing. "[It provides] a feeling that you have some power over your own life, or power in your community."
Sing believes that a girl's impulse to join a gang may come from the right place, even though the outcome itself is negative. In many cases, girls form gangs or posses because they yearn for a sense of belonging, a sense of family, and a sense of safety. "What it ends up being, however, is not the positive experience they think it's going to be," says Sing.
Sing notes that female gang members can end up in jail or addicted to drugs. And while some girls may join a gang to protect themselves against violence, the gang's actions — attacking other women or rival gang members — often put them smack in the middle of more violence. If the gang is involved in criminal activity, like stealing or selling drugs, members can wind up in jail.
Sing and other counselors try to start with what they call the "harm reduction" approach. "Initially you start having a conversation about keeping safe," she says. Then the counselor works on building a relationship before challenging the girls to examine their choices.
For example, Sing might say to a 15-year-old girl, "You say the gang keeps you safe, yet all these people you know are getting hurt by the gang." From there she'll talk with the girls about re-evaluating their lives and convincing them that there are other options.
For girls who fall into gangs, life is not over. "Often they think, 'this is it' and they get locked into it," she says. "It's about giving them options and choices, so they think otherwise." |
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