Girls, Aggression, and Intersectionality

Transforming the Discourse of "Mean Girls" in the United States

Krista Mcqueeney, Alicia Girgenti-Malone, Krista Mcqueeney, Alicia A. Girgenti-Malone, Alicia Girgenti-Malone, Krista Mcqueeney, Alicia A. Girgenti-Malone

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9780367460112
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351671941
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

From media images of "mean girls" to the disproportionate punishment of Black, Latina and/or queer girls in schools and the justice system, female aggression has become a public concern. Scholars, educators, policymakers and parents are scrambling to respond to the perceived upsurge in girls' bullying, peer pressure, and aggression/violence.

Girls, Aggression and Intersectionality examines how intersecting social identities – such as race, ethnicity, class, sexuality, age, and others - shape media representations of, and criminal justice reactions to, female aggression. The book focuses on three overarching questions: How do race, class, and/or sexuality influence media images of female aggression? How do aggressive girls' intersecting identities affect law enforcement and criminal justice responses to their aggression? How are diverse groups of girls trying to resist their labelling and criminalization?

Using intersectionality as a conceptual framework, this insightful volume deconstructs a unitary analysis of "female aggression" and transforms the mainstream discourse that paints girls as inherently "mean."

Girls, Aggression and Intersectionality will appeal to undergraduate and postgraduate students, as well as postdoctoral researchers, interested in fields including Gender Studies, Women's Studies, Youth Studies, Criminology and Media and Culture.

Part I
Media representations of girls’ aggression and violence

1 Girls and violence

Moral panics and the policing of girlhood

Meda Chesney-Lind and Lisa Pasko

Nearly two decades into the twenty-first century, and it seems like the bad news about girls and girlhood just keeps coming. Girls are going “wild,” girls are “mean” (and certainly meaner than boys), and, even more troubling, girls are becoming as violent as boys, with even cheerleaders getting charged with murder (Brennan, 2016, n.p.). Current media coverage of modern girlhood, at least in the United States, is virtually all grim, and it is clear as to the source of the problem – girls are becoming more like boys, and that is bad news for girls.

As an example, in June 2001, an ABC special on trends in gang membership maintained that girls are “catching up with boys in this one area,” “joining gangs for the same reasons as boys,” and engaging in the same activities as boys: selling drugs and committing murder (Gibbs, 2001, n.p.). The story closed with a prediction that the drug-selling, violent gang member – girl gang member – is “everywhere” (Gibbs, 2001, n.p.). On August 3, 2008, The Independent lamented, in an editorial, “Sugar and Spice … Why Have Our Little Girls Turned Sour?” (Street-Porter, 2008, n.p.).

On July 28, 2009, New Jersey attorney general Anne Milgram announced that law enforcement officials had dismantled an all-female-led, gang-involved narcotics ring. Dubbing the investigation “Operation Bloodette,” Milgram went on to state that she wished “this was not one [glass] ceiling women were breaking” and that “women are taking over dominant roles in traditionally male-dominated gangs” (Read, 2009, n.p.). Finally, in March 2006, ABC’s Good Morning America contributed to these stories with a series titled, “Why Girls Are Getting More Violent: Violence Is on the Rise among High School Girls” (ABC News, 2006). One segment was specifically labeled “Girls Are Beating and Bullying.”

Speaking of bullying, what about all the media focus on “mean” girls? The manipulative and damaging characteristics of girls’ social worlds have been the subject of high-profile bestselling books like Odd Girl Out (Simmons, 2002) and Queen Bees and Wannabes (Wiseman, 2002). These, in turn, spawned hit movies like Mean Girls and also innumerable articles. The New York Times Magazine ran a cover story titled, “Girls Just Want to Be Mean,” in which the author noted that “it is not just boys who can bully” (Talbot, 2002, p. 24), and other media outlets quickly jumped on the bandwagon, running stories with titles like “Girl Bullies Don’t Leave Black Eyes, Just Agony” (Elizabeth, 2002, p. A1), “She Devils” (Metcalf, 2002, p. L06), and “Just between Us Girls: Not Enough Sugar, Too Much Spite” (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 2002, p. 87). Such stories went on to suggest that the root of mean girls was their mean mothers (Brown, 2015) and that such “mean girls” are so ever-present that they can be found even in senior living and retirement communities (Mapes, 2011, n.p.).

Books like Odd Girl Out and Queen Bees and Wannabes rely on recent psychological research on aggression, in particular what is called “relational,” “covert,” or “indirect” aggression (Underwood, Galen, & Paquette, 2001, p. 248). The concept of relational or covert aggression relates to a repertoire of passive and/or indirect behaviors (e.g., rolling eyes, spreading rumors, ostracizing, and ignoring), used with the intent to hurt or harm others (Crick & Grotpeter, 1995), and thus the concept expands the range of behaviors that are considered aggressive in nature.

By identifying a “relational,” “covert,” or “indirect” aggression, rather than a physical type of aggression, researchers argued that they shattered the myth of the nonaggressive girl (see Bjorkqvist & Niemela, 1992). These researchers noted that girls are as aggressive as boys when these indirect aggressions are considered. In fact, they claimed that they were not only shattering myths but that they were unraveling years of gender bias in which male researchers tended to look only at male problems. Bjorkqvist and Niemela (1992, p. 5) argued that researchers, “the majority being males, … may, for personal reasons, find male aggression easier to understand and a more appealing object of study.”

While this characterization of the “discovery” has been widely accepted, there are reasons to be skeptical that this concept benefits girls. First, does this aggression really challenge stereotypes and myths about girls? Thinking about the behaviors included in relational aggression, this research argues that girls and women are manipulative, sneaky, mean spirited, and backstabbing. Hardly new ideas, which may, in fact, be one reason that the public and the media embraced them so quickly.

More important, the literature on relational aggression does not consistently support the notion that girls specialize in these forms of aggression, while boys are more physically aggressive (see Chesney-Lind, Morash, & Irwin, 2007). For example, University of Georgia researchers randomly selected 745 sixth graders from nine middle schools across six school districts in Northeast Georgia. The student participants took computer surveys each spring semester for seven years, from 6th grade to 12th (Orpinas, McNicholas, & Nahapetyan, 2014).

Key findings included the following. First, covert and relational aggression is extremely common; 96 percent of the students who participated in the study reported at least one act of relational aggression (meaning that everyone is mean sometimes), and 92.3 percent of boys and 94.3 percent of girls said they’d been the victim of such an attack at one point during the study period. Second, they found that boys admitted to significantly more acts of relational aggression than girls did – and girls were more likely to be victims. Finally, and of the greatest significance, of the meanest kids (the ones who fell into the “high” relational aggression group), 66.7 percent were boys and 33.3 percent were girls (Orpinas et al., 2014).

So, while the media focus on the “meanness” of girls, the reality is that boys might be meaner than girls. But what of media hype regarding those “bad” girls who are using violence, including those in gangs? Are girls really seeking violent equality with their male counterparts, as the media insist? There is also an important racial element to this journalism. Stock media imagery of girls, particularly girls in gangs, tends to suggest that these girls are just as menacing as their male counterparts. Newsweek did this by using a stereotypical headline, “Girls Will Be Girls,” while showing a picture of a Black girl holding a gun and wearing a mask, with the subtitle “Some girls carry guns. Others hide razor blades in their mouths” (Leslie, Biddle, Rosenberg, & Wayne, 1993, p. 44). In essence, Black and Latina violence is positioned in ways that invite a contrast to the assumed “nonviolence” of White girls.

Media accounts of this “problem” also suggest that the observed “trend” in girls’ violence is explained by girls trying to act like boys. There’s nothing new about this argument, by the way, which is a not so subtle attack on women’s political efforts to seek equality with men. In the 1920s opponents of women’s suffrage fretted about increases in “intensely immoral” behavior among the “modern age of girls,” and in the 1930s commentators contented that “women [were] becoming more criminally minded” as a result of “the fight for Emancipation” (Pollock, 2014, p. 84). By the 1970s, the argument was that the second wave of feminism had “caused” a surge in women’s serious crimes (Chesney-Lind, 1986).

The current media hype about girls’ violence (particularly gang violence) is shaped by other vectors of privilege, notably race and class. The clear message in the contemporary coverage of girls’ violence is that while White girls might be “mean,” the kind of aggression and violence that requires criminalization (and incarceration) is being committed almost exclusively by girls of color, often living in marginalized, low-income neighborhoods. Of course, the masculinization of women of color, often to justify their harsh treatment, has a long and sordid history in the United States, since it was initially used to justify the terrible impact of slavery (and later Jim Crow) on the lives of African American women. In current media, girls’ and women’s “aggression” are clearly intersectional in their construction, reinforcing heterosexist and racist notions simultaneously (Burgess-Proctor, 2006; Potter, 2008).

As an example of how such intersections play out in the media, take the case of the San Antonio Four, four openly lesbian Latinas who were charged with and convicted of aggravated sexual assault on a child. As young women just starting college, Elizabeth Ramirez, Kristie Mayhugh, Cassandra Rivera, and Anna Vasquez were convicted in Texas in the late 1990s of gang-raping Ramirez’s two nieces, who had stayed for a weekend with their aunt while their parents vacationed. Ramirez’s friends had visited over the weekend, and when the parents returned, several members of Ramirez’s family went to the authorities with stories of abuse. Subsequent media accounts – steered by prosecutors with little confrontation or challenge – masculinized the women as “monsters,” using their race and sexuality as evidence of a predilection for sexual violence. As one defendant noted, “There was only one way of thinking – that homosexuality meant child abuse. During our interrogation, during the jury selection, that’s all they were asking” (Lambert, 2016, n.p.). While serving sentences ranging from 15 to 37 years, the four women were ultimately exonerated in November 2016, after witnesses recanted and forensic and medical evidence was debunked. Indeed, the “victims” in the case had come forward years earlier and stated that some members of Ramirez’s family had fabricated the story and encouraged them to lie, as backlash to Ramirez’s recent coming out as a lesbian woman (Grinberg, 2016).

Despite such media constructions and illustrations of injustice, is it true that girls and young women, particularly those of color, are more violent today than in decades past?

Trends in girls’ use of violence: a critical analysis

Since the 1990s, there has been plenty of official evidence that girls have been getting arrested for offenses that are not typically associated with female delinquency – in particular, simple assault. For example, although juvenile arrests have declined in recent years, girls now constitute a much larger percentage of juvenile arrests than they did in years past. In 1983, girls made up 21.4 percent of juvenile arrests; by 1997, they represented 26.9 percent; and in 2015 they were 29.4 percent of juvenile arrests (Chesney-Lind & Merlo, 2015; Federal Bureau of Investigation [FBI], 2016). Much of this is due to the fact that arrests of boys, particularly for offenses such as simple assault, have fallen more sharply than girls’ arrests for the same offense (47.8 percent compared to 39.5 percent for girls from 2006 to 2015) (FBI, 2016).

Juvenile court and correctional data reveal a similar theme. Since 1990, girls’ adjudications for person offenses have increased by 60 percent, now representing 22 percent of all youth adjudicated on such charges (Sickmund, Sladky, & Kang, 2015). Likewise, the number of girls in custody for a violent crime has also been on the rise. In 1989, 8,512 girls were in detention for a violent offense; 25 years later, that number has more than doubled to 17,730 (Sickmund et al., 2015). Given these increases, it is not surprising that both the media and scholars have shifted their attention to girls’ violence. However, such focus of attention usually involves exaggerated commentary on gang behavior, schoolyard fights, mean-girl bullying (relational aggression), or domestic violence-related actions rather than a judicious exploration of the contexts that produce girls’ violence and the dynamics involved (see Chesney-Lind & Irwin, 2008).

What about other data on girls’ violence? The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta has monitored youthful behavior in a national sample of school-age youth in a number of domains (including violence) at regular intervals since 1991 in a biennial survey entitled the Youth Risk Behavior Survey. As an example, a review of the data collected over the 1990s and into the new millennium reveals that, although only 34.4 percent of girls surveyed in 1991 said that they had been in a physical fight in the previous year, just over half (50.2 percent) of the boys reported fighting. By 2014, only 16.5 percent of girls reported being in such a fight (CDC, 2000, 2010, 2015). In essence, the data show that girls have always been more violent than their stereotype suggests but also that girls’ violence, at least by their own accounts, has been decreasing, not increasing.

To further explore these issues about girls’ self-reported violence and likelihood of arrest, Stevens, Morash, and Chesney-Lind (2011) used ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of tables and figures
• About the contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I Media representations of girls’ aggression and violence
• Part II Criminalization and resistance
• Index