Girls and Gangs

MJ: What are the different types of involvement girls can have in gangs?

MCL: The most dangerous kind of girl involvement with gangs is one where the girls are just sort of hanging around the gang boys or even being part of the male gang. We have some pretty horrific accounts of what happens to girls in those situations, particularly sexual assaults. [Even if] those are labeled as a way to get into the gang, it’s not a stretch to say they’re […] gang rapes. That kind of gang involvement is one where girls are the most vulnerable. But I still think the gang solves for those girls a problem of giving them identity and visibility in a society that typically ignores them. It’s a reaction to even worse situations at home, which is a horrific thing to have to say. And a kind of a sense of power—girls often feel very powerless in their lives and their families, and they kind of mimic the male violence as a way to try and get some of that male power that they see lacking in their own lives.

Independent gangs like the Potrero Hill Girls [in San Francisco] can even support the young women economically. That gang would go through the housing project there and ask people what they need from Nieman Marcus and various other tony stores, and shoplift on order and then bring them back and support children that way. We understand that’s theft, but that kind of economic independence and that kind of moxie, I think a lot of people can relate to.

MJ: : How are female gangs structured?

MCL: One researcher of L.A.’s Latina gangs in the ‘70s found that they functioned a lot like a Girl Scout troop. Girls came to Girl Scouting at about the same age in white communities as girls in Hispanic communities came to gangs. They had lists of rules for their members. It was very much like a club for girls. Some early gang work in the ‘50s tried to take the girl gangs and turn them into social clubs because in many ways that was already how they were functioning. Girls tended to leave the gangs at the age that girls tended to leave Girl Scouts in white communities. Of course, you don’t have a Scout leader.

MJ: What is the age range of women who join gangs?

MCL: They come to the gangs around age 15, but girls age out of gangs somewhat earlier than boys, often because they get pregnant. That gives them a legitimate out from gang involvement—you’ve got economic pressures of being a mom. This might propel them into petty crime, as it did with the Potrero Hill Girls, and in fact many of them shoplifted with their young babies. But it sobers you up. Some of the bravado, the craziness, la vida loca is no longer as attractive as it was when you were younger.

MJ: Are drugs a problem in female gangs?

MCL: Drugs and alcohol are omnipresent, especially in mixed-gender gangs. What gangs really do is they mostly just hang around and drink and tell stories of past confrontations. But then the boys will launch out and respond to some imagined wrong and get in serious trouble. And then when the drug trade is involved, it becomes lethal. That’s more typical of boy gang membership—the gang becomes the employer as well as a social outlet. Men frequently get locked up, come out, try to get their lives together, can’t, and fall back into the gang because the it offers economic sources of support in the illicit economy. That’s less true of girl gangs.

Girls are on the edges of that environment, and that’s one of their problems. When they’re arrested with their boyfriends, often the boyfriends can trade information for reduced sentences. The girls can’t; they don’t have the information. They don’t know where the drugs came from or the names of the people up the line.

MJ: What do you think about the media’s portrayal of women in gangs?

MCL: There’s only one thing worse than not paying attention to girls in gangs—it’s paying attention to girls in gangs. The public reaction to girls and women who engage in nontraditional behavior—the hysteria that often surrounds girls in these groups—is almost as interesting as the behavior itself. There was a time when Oprah and Geraldo and everyone in the world were doing really terrible programs on girls in gangs. The nuanced analysis of what’s going on in the lives of these girls is important: they’re still girls of color, they face enormous educational neglect, they face terrible poverty, they don’t see a great life ahead of themselves. They’re realistic, especially African-American girls, about the fact that the men in their community will not marry them. They’ll never have a conventional family to look forward to. They’re trying to negotiate a grim future for themselves.

MJ: What are some of the most common misconceptions about female gang members?

MCL: That they’re exactly like their male counterpoints. The media construction of them makes them look masculinized and very scary. The media will often stuff guns in their hands or bandannas over their faces and take pictures of them. That’s often positioned against stereotypical white femininity, the Lindsay Lohan kind of whiteness. Girls in gangs typically don’t carry guns, they certainly don’t brandish them the way male gang members do. That isn’t an accurate portrayal of girls in gangs at all.

MJ: What are some possible solutions being discussed nowadays to female gang membership?

MCL: Gender-responsive programming is very important—accessing traditional girls-serving organizations and women’s organizations to provide mentoring opportunities for young women, to reach across race and class divides, to work with the Girls Scouts and YWCA; to work with women legislators to make sure there’s advocacy for girls in the justice system. If you’re doing gang peacemaking, I hope that the men--and it’s almost always men who work in these youth-serving agencies—realize that there are girls there and that they need to hire young women from those ethnic groups to work with those young women. I don’t think the men can do it. They’re often too identified with boys they’re working with, and they have some of the same attitudes. Gang research has also typically been a male domain. Our stereotype is that gang delinquency is a boy problem.

MJ: Are there many groups doing outreach to female gang members or involved in prevention?

MCL: Around the country, juvenile courts are seeing more girls than they ever have before as a proportion of their caseload. We’ve just topped 30 percent in terms of juvenile arrests of girls. There’s a whole national conversation about gender-responsive programming for girls. Places like Baltimore have experimented with female-only probation caseloads. Delinquency prevention and intervention programs are a little slower to pick this up because they’re so used to working with boys. Girls have historically been ignored.