Fighting for Girls

New Perspectives on Gender and Violence

Meda Chesney-Lind, Nikki Jones, Meda Chesney-Lind, Nikki Jones

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9781438432946, 9781438432939
• eBook ISBN: 9781438432953
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

Have girls really gone wild? Despite the media fascination with "bad girls, " facts beyond the hype have remained unclear. Fighting for Girls focuses on these facts, and using the best data availabe about actual trends in girls' uses of violence, the scholars here find that by virtually any measure available, incidents of girls' violence are going down, not up. Additionally, rather than attributing girls violence to personality or to girls becoming "more like boys, " Fighting for Girls focuses on the contexts that produce violence in girls, demonstrating how addressing the unique problems that confront girls in dating relationships, families, school hallways and classrooms, and in distressed urban neighborhoods can help reduce girls' use of violence. Often including girls' own voices, contributors to the volume illustrate why girls use violence in certain situations, encouraging us to pay attention to trauma in the girls' pasts as well as how violence becomes a tool girls use to survive toxic families, deteriorated neighborhoods, and neglectful schools.

PART I

REAL TRENDS IN FEMALE VIOLENCE:
GETTING TOUGH ON GIRLS

ONE

HAVE “GIRLS GONE WILD”?

Mike Males

Britney, Paris, Lindsay … poster girls-gone-wild for “the new normalcy of addiction for young women” and “the dwindling state of young women's mental health,” as one progressive author declares (Martin, 2007, 2007a)? Drunken driving, hard drugs, crazed standoffs, wild hookup sex, even beatings and guns—are pop starlets run amuck the new American Everygirl?

The modern young woman is “a bubbling, acid pit of guilt and shame and jealousy and restlessness and anxiety,” announces feminist Courtney Martin (Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters, 2007: 4). “We are more diseased and more addicted than any generation of young women that has come before … succumbing to dangerous emotional numbs—eating disorders, binge drinking, and even harder drugs” (Martin, 2007a). Worse, adds Loyola University Chicago psychologist James Garbarino, shocked Americans are witnessing a “recent, dramatic increase in violence by troubled girls” (See Jane Hit, 2006: 15). Harvard School of Public Health professors Deborah Prothrow-Stith and Howard Spivak warn of “increased rates of girls’ arrests for violent crime, including homicide” (Sugar and Spice and No Longer Nice, 2005: 48).

So, what else is new? Every older generation recycles the same panics about girls—perpetually shocking sexual precocity, drinking, muggings, insanity—decade after decade. The 1940s and ‘50s, for example, brought a barrage of government-sponsored docudramas featuring lusty teen girls seducing and robbing innocent men, laughingly gunning down motorists, dying in gunfights with cops. “They start with stealing lipstick, finish with a slaying!” blared “frank truth” films like Girls Under 21, Girls of the Night, So Young So Bad, Delinquent Daughters, and Girls in the Night. Best-selling early-1950s books blazoned busty, fist-clenched, gun-brandishing teen girls and titles like The Young and Violent, Jailbait, Juvenile Jungle, Teenage Crime Wave, Live Fast Die Young, and (my favorite) I'll Fix You. Major magazines like Life, Reader's Digest, and Ladies Home Journal warned that hundreds of teenage “pickup” girls as young as twelve were making “the sex delinquency of young girls” the worst problem cities faced. “Are These Our Children?” (Look, 21 September 1942) and “Boston's Bad Girls” (Pic, 17 August 1943) clarioned “Everytown, USA,” terrorized by girls gone berserk: “Arrests for drunkenness of girls are up 40 percent … prostitution, 64 percent … truancy cases are up 400 percent … sex offenses involving teen-age girls, up 200 percent … the average age of offenders is fifteen …” (Barson & Heller, 1998: 35, 38). Everything, in short, but Debbie Does Nukes.

Still, the attacks on girls today, reflecting the same bizarre combination of sympathy for girls’ presumed female delicateness and fury at girls’ assumed aggressiveness, appear to be setting new records for ferocity. Popular psychologist-author Mary Pipher's Reviving Ophelia (1995, 1998) brands girls “moody, demanding, and distant … sullen and secretive … depressed … overwhelmed … anorexic … alcoholic … traumatized …” and “fragile … saplings in a hurricane” of “eating disorders, school phobias, self-inflicted injuries … great unhappiness … anxiety …” (all that before we're halfway through her first chapter!). In Queen Bees and Wannabes’ first 15 pages, Rachel Wiseman (2002) calls girls “confused,” “insecure,” “lashing out,” “totally obnoxious,” “moody,” “cruel,” “sneaky,” “lying,” “mean,” “exclusive,” and “catty.” “GIRLS ARE MEAN,” emphasizes Girl Wars coauthor Cheryl Dellasega (referring to those who haven't gone through her “relational aggression” program), and “the seriousness of these behaviors is reaching new proportions, resulting in criminal charges, school shootings, and suicides” (Dellasega & Nixon, 2003: 4).

Books by scholarly and professional authors, pundits’ commentaries, and mass-media splashes on girls’ “new” pathologies have adopted the same sensationalism, titillation, and stereotyping that can only be termed poisonous. The detail that none of the commentators knew the Gloucester, Massachusetts, high school girls they falsely accused of forging a “teen pregnancy pact” did not temper the media's factless disparagements (Kingsbury, 2008), repeated in commentators’ later vilifications of the pregnancy of 2008 Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin's 17-year-old daughter. CBS Evening News’ crusade against girls, including inflammatory reports on binge drinking (6 May 2007), Internet “dangers” (19–22 November 2007), and violence (19 January 2007), typified the mind-numbingly identical girl-bashing reports. All featured dire alarms by self-interested sources and zero genuine evidence (unless staged videos of a minor scuffles, a girl's slap in a Harry Potter movie, and “Powerpuff Girls” cartoons are “evidence”). But when Pennsylvania State University criminologist Darrell Steffensmeier (et al., 2005) and the Department of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention's Girls Study Group (Zahn, 2007) released comprehensive compilations of decades of solid measures showing that girls’ violence had not risen, commentators and the major media couldn't get interested.

What are we to make of today's seemingly irrational fear and hostility toward girls? An important factor driving modern girl-fearing may be racial change. Four in 10 girls and young women under age 25 today are black, Latina, Asian, or otherwise of color, dramatically larger percentages than in older generations. Most girl-fearing commentators are white, but they have been joined by some prominent, older African Americans such as entertainer Bill Cosby (2004; see also Dyson, 2005) and pundits Juan Williams (2007), Earl Ofari Hutchinson (2007), and Bob Herbert (see Males, 2004) who also echo racist stereotypes that characterize black girls as increasingly promiscuous and violent (see sidebar).

SAN FRANCISCO'S SHAME

Crude racial and sexual stereotypes toward girls have real consequences, even in the modern era and the most liberal of cities. In San Francisco, the press, police, and interest groups obsessively ignited inflamed panics toward “girl gangs” and crime, ballooning minor assaults into unheard-of crises. Perhaps it's no surprise, then, that African American girls, who comprised just 13% of the city's girls in 2007, suffered four-fifths of girls’ drug arrests and 70% of girls’ incarcerations. Astoundingly, San Francisco black girls suffer more drug arrests numerically than black girls in Los Angeles (a city whose black population is 20 times larger) and are 15 times more likely to be arrested for drugs than black girls elsewhere in California.

Do San Francisco's black girls suffer extraordinary drug problems, then? Other than arrest, no. California Department of Health Services and Drug Abuse Warning Network reports show that African American females under age 20 accounted for none of San Francisco's 5,000 overdose deaths and fewer than one-half of 1% of hospital emergency cases involving illicit drugs over the last decade. In contrast, two-thirds involved whites, 61% involved males, and 60% were over age 35 (San Francisco Juvenile Probation Department, 2007).

Repeated efforts by the author on behalf of the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice to obtain explanations from San Francisco human rights, police, and political agencies for the city's drastically excessive arrests of black girls brought only evasion and indifference. In a progressive city whose burgeoning drug abuse crisis is inconveniently centered in white middle-aged men—a wealthy, powerful constituency politicians, interests, and press covet—the usefulness of scapegoating black girls clearly un...

Table of contents

• Series Title
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• PART 1 REAL TRENDS IN FEMALE VIOLENCE
• PART II. GIRLS’ VIOLENCE
• PART III. GIRLS’ VIOLENCE
• Epilogue Moral Panics, Violence
• About the Contributors