Why Girls Fight

Female Youth Violence in the Inner City

Cindy D. Ness

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9780814758670
• Topic: Psicologia
• Subtopic: Storia e teoria della psicologia

In low-income U.S. cities, street fights between teenage girls are common. These fights take place at school, on street corners, or in parks, when one girl provokes another to the point that she must either “step up” or be labeled a “punk.” Typically, when girls engage in violence that is not strictly self-defense, they are labeled “delinquent,” their actions taken as a sign of emotional pathology. However, in Why Girls Fight, Cindy D. Ness demonstrates that in poor urban areas this kind of street fighting is seen as a normal part of girlhood and a necessary way to earn respect among peers, as well as a way for girls to attain a sense of mastery and self-esteem in a social setting where legal opportunities for achievement are not otherwise easily available.

Ness spent almost two years in west and northeast Philadelphia to get a sense of how teenage girls experience inflicting physical harm and the meanings they assign to it. While most existing work on girls’ violence deals exclusively with gangs, Ness sheds new light on the everyday street fighting of urban girls, arguing that different cultural standards associated with race and class influence the relationship that girls have to physical aggression.

1

Introduction

If I seem like I’m scared to fight, some girl is gonna think she can mess with me all the time. I mean, even if I don’t seem scared, she’s gonna try me at some point till she knows how I am. She just better not go crying to anyone that I beat her the fuck up. I hate it when someone is a sore loser.

—Tamika, a 15-year-old girl

Fighting is about image. It’s about showing you’re no punk. I know I don’t rule the world, but I can feel like I do, make you think I do. Fighting is independence. I beat someone up if I feel like it.

—Allie, a 14-year-old girl

You kidding me, girls be fighting more than boys do. They so emotional they’ll fight over anything. Boys won’t get into it over no he-said, she-said. They only gonna fight over something serious like money or drugs. That’s not what a girl is fighting about most of the time.

—Kia, a 15-year-old girl

On any given day in the West and Northeast Philadelphia neighborhoods that I refer to as Melrose Park and Lee, respectively, it is not uncommon to hear about a street fight that has “gone down” between girls. In certain instances, the fight takes place in a school hallway; in others, after the school day ends at a given time and place. Or perhaps it breaks out spontaneously on a street corner or a park after one girl provokes another past the point where she either must “step up” to a situation or otherwise be labeled a “punk.” Far less common, though certainly not unheard of, is a scenario in which a female youth challenges a male youth to a fight or is likewise challenged to one. However, in any of these cases, whether she wins or loses, it is standing up to the challenge more than anything else that earns a girl a sense of respect among her peers. While much has been written about the relationship between violence and respect as it applies to male youths in low-income neighborhoods, the literature is virtually silent along these lines concerning girls.¹

Why do female adolescent youths in impoverished urban neighborhoods so readily engage in street fights and other forms of physical violence? The answer is far more complicated than the dichotomous morality tale of girls who are “good” and girls who are “bad,” the explanation that the use of physical aggression by girls has historically been accorded. Indeed, rather than being characteristic of only a relatively small subset of female youths with social and emotional problems who are prone to delinquency, street fighting is an important part of girlhood in high-crime neighborhoods. In such neighborhoods, physical aggression becomes an acceptable and normative, albeit regrettable, response for girls and sometimes even for the mothers of girls if their daughters are outnumbered in a fight or if a fight is brought to the household doorstep.

The vignette that follows describes an actual fight that took place in Melrose Park over a period of several days in which two girls, their mothers, female peers, and female relatives all got involved. As with most fights, the subtlest body movements and verbal barbs send a message about how ready one is to cross the line into physical violence. The participants, who all know each other, are “experienced observers” in the neighborhood, with respect to what constitutes a challenge that can be walked away from as opposed to one that must be met head on. While the encounter is at first characterized by verbal attack and posturing, and it seems like the girls have no intention of actually fighting, the demeanor and displays of ego are just a first step in the buildup to an actual and larger altercation that transpires days later. The issue at hand is perceived to be important enough to bring family members into the fray, as well as neighbors if necessary.

Marcea comes walking down the block with her girlfriends and sees her boyfriend Rashid sitting between two girls, Lakeesha and Candace, on a stoop. Marcea is clearly incensed over Rashid’s proximity to Candace. She demands that Rashid come over to her, and Lakeesha and Candace erupt in laughter. Marcea is making a scene in the middle of the street but without approaching. It is Candace who is first to goad her to say something directly. In return, Marcea’s friends egg her on, and within seconds she is cursing in Candace’s face. Candace stands up, and the girls challenge each other to fight. Though verbal insults and pointed fingers are flying, with the other girls holding shoes and handbags and pulling the two apart at critical moments, it is truly amazing that Marcea and Candace do not actually touch. In the midst of the chaos, Rashid has disappeared. After a good five minutes of posturing, each girl labels the other a punk and the two groups disperse. But it is clear that the situation is not resolved. The question is when and where it will erupt next.

About an hour later, Marcea’s mother and seven or eight females come to Candace’s sister’s house, where Candace lives. The older women hanging out on Candace’s block stand within striking distance should they be needed. Marcea’s mother and Candace’s sister exchange words, and at one point Marcea’s mother yells, “just because I have my keefah [religious garb] on, don’t think I can’t get ignorant with you.” She makes it clear that Rashid is like her son and that Candace needs to stay away from him. Candace’s sister, however, no longer wants to discuss this incident. She confronts Marcea’s mother about bringing the situation to her doorstep. Both women clearly lay out which boundaries cannot be crossed. This seems to be enough to end the matter for the evening.

Two days later, Lakeesha beats up Marcea because “she said stupid things, so I punched her in her face.” While Candace will fight to save face, hence all the showmanship, Lakeesha has historically had more of a proclivity toward fighting, although much less so recently. Already angry about something else, she took care of the situation for Candace. However, the situation was more complex than Lakeesha happening on an opportunity to let off some steam. Marcea had continued to talk badly about Candace in public and threatened to beat Candace up at some later time. There was an understanding between Candace and Lakeesha that if either needed help in managing a physical confrontation, the other would step in. As such, Lakeesha perceived the bad-mouthing of Candace to be a show of disrespect to her, as well. To let the situation go on for much longer would be a blemish on the reputation she had made for herself as a girl with “heart” and not one who is a patsy.

Although they all live in the same community within two blocks from each other, Lakeesha and Candace, Marcea’s mother, and Candace’s sister and guardian each have a different relationship to violence, the explanation for which can be found in the details of their personal stories. While each is aware of the set of shared meanings or “understandings,” social rules, and relationship terms that surround the resort to physical aggression by girls in their neighborhood, each has come to appropriate these understandings differently. At the same time, it would be impossible to explain the fighting sequence described above without also crediting the influence that larger macro factors and organizational structures have on the identity, perceptions, and values of girls and women living in Melrose Park and Lee.

Historically, however, the social sciences have dealt with macro-level and individual-level factors as separate matters of inquiry, despite the fact that both levels are inextricably linked in their effects on human experience. While the trend toward connecting levels of analysis in the social sciences has become increasingly common in recent years, scholarship on girls’ violence along these lines still remains relatively scant. To address this gap, in this book I explore the social and cultural organization of female youth violence in inner-city neighborhoods on a collective level, as well as the individual-level responses to those structuring conditions. I engage in an analysis and synthesis of both the macro and micro elements that inhere in a violent act—that is, its social, cultural, and psychological components.

It is essential to begin any discussion of female youth violence by first observing that the term “violent girls” is in and of itself highly problematic.² The assumptions that underlie the contemporary use of the term, for all intents and purposes, conform to the sociocultural ideals of white, middle-class communities. In white, middle-class communities, females are normatively conceptualized either as victims or, more recently, as perpetrating what is referred to as “relational violence”: a subtle form of verbal aggression that uses relationships to manipulate and psychologically harm others. No conceptual framework exists in such communities with which to think about physically violent girls without marginalizing or devaluing them. Any girl who engages in physical violence can only be considered anomalous in terms of gender identity. In middle-class neighborhoods, such a girl is typically unpopular, except with others like herself, and is viewed by adults as being “troubled.”

The term “violent girls” applied to girls in inner cities imposes a set of assumptions about proper behavior and roles, which do not correspond to the lived social realities of these girls, like the ones that I followed over a period of nearly two years: for example, that males are protectors, that females are not violent, and that females who fight are not considered feminine. The term “violent girls” does not convey that gender socialization in Melrose Park and Lee emphasizes the importance of a girl being able to defend herself. For the most part, the discourse on girls’ violence centers on girls being out of control and dangerous. It does not take into consideration that girls in inner cities commonly feel they have no choice but to respond aggressively and that, by doing so, among other things, they believe themselves to be gaining a modicum of security. Unfortunately, the contribution of context has received short shrift when considering why girls turn to violence.³

Importantly, distinctions in race and class, which influence the profoundly different relationships that a girl can have to physical violence, tend to be implied when the subject of girls’ violence is addressed in the media or the academic literature on the subject but are not typically developed in a way that meaningfully shows this interdependency. The usual takeaway message in the media is that female youth violence is mostly a minority phenomenon limited to delinquent or sociopathic girls. Few studies have systematically considered the instrumental value that engaging in violence has for girls or the normative social symbolic code that supports it in low-income minority neighborhoods.⁴

Research in the social sciences, particularly within criminology, the discipline that has taken the greatest interest in girls’ violence, has almost exclusively concentrated on the most “extreme” manifestations of female youth violence and on female youth violence committed in connection with illegal activities—for example, girls who belong to gangs,⁵ commit homicide,⁶ are involved in drug-related violence,⁷ or embrace violence as a strategy to stave off domestic victimization⁸—not the majority of instances in which girls in inner cities physically aggress.⁹ Indeed, the typical display of violence by girls in inner cities is the everyday street fight, which often flies below the radar screen of accountability (i.e., is not reported to the police and does not result in arrest or emergency room visits). Though most of the violence in which females engage does not reach the level of danger to which male youth violence rises, female youth violence possesses a sophisticated organization and discourse of its own that is rooted in the social fabric of a neighborhood, its “codes,” and its structures of belief.¹⁰ If we are to adequately investigate what it means for girls in inner cities to commit physical aggression, we must take a less-narrow view of the subject and contextualize their aggression far more fully than we have yet done. In this book, I attempt to do just that.

I spent almost two years “hanging out” with girls in Melrose Park and Lee, two impoverished urban neighborhoods, observing and interviewing them about the meanings they ascribed to their own violence. I was interested in knowing more about how girls, themselves, thought about fighting. Indeed, I wanted to know how prevalent fighting by girls really is. I hoped to get underneath the sensationalistic accounts that dominated the increased media coverage over the past several decades, beginning in the mid 1970s, and see what I could discover. I wanted to get to the level of detail that rarely reaches us about why girls in some neighborhoods are more likely to physically aggress. Through presenting the accounts of 16 female adolescent youths who engage in violence—in addition to the accounts of their friends, family members, neighborhood residents, teachers, school administrators, criminal justice professionals, and mental health personnel with whom I sought contact in order to better understand the girls’ behavior—here I attempt to provide a sense of the many complex reasons that contemporary female youths living in inner cities resort to street fighting or other forms of violence. Though this one volume could not possibly represent the experiences of all inner-city females who have committed or will commit violence, my hope is that it will open the gate to more accounts expressed by girls themselves and that it will serve to bring added dimension to the subject in the literature.

The Wider Context

In the mid 1980s, the juvenile violent crime rate in the United States began a steep ascent, which lasted nearly a decade before peaking in 1994. The spike, largely a phenomenon of inner-city neighborhoods, was all the more startling because it came at a time when crime rates had been falling and were expected to continue to fall as the country’s baby-boomer population aged out of its most crime-prone years. Experts from a variety of disciplines advanced a clash of theories to account for the surge, ranging from the moral decay of the nation’s youth (in particular, DiIulio 1995, 1996) to the institutional decay of its cities. If consensus lay anywhere, it was in identifying the crack epidemic that was well under way by the mid 1980s, and the influx of handguns that accompanied it, as the “epidemic’s” proximal causes (Blumstein and Wallman, 2000). The trend was further exacerbated by a dramatic increase in the access to guns by juveniles.¹¹

One of the inadvertent consequences of what became known as the war on drugs and subsequently the war on violence was the unprecedented attention it brought to female juvenile violence. Zero-tolerance policies of the 1990s largely put an end to the paternalism of the criminal justice system toward female criminals and resulted in many more women and girls, disproportionately poor minorities, being arrested and prosecuted.¹² The media, seizing on accounts of minority female adolescents gratuitously victimizing other youths, provided the issue with a disturbing public face that aroused fear.¹³ The phrase “girls gone wild,” used both by female adolescents to represent their own aggressive behavior and by the authorities in their lives—though with vastly different connotations—came to signify the essence of the phenomenon for many.

In academia, debate took shape over whether the quality and proportional quantity of girls’ violence had actually changed or whether the appearance that it had was an artifact of sentencing practices and media sensationalism. Whichever the case, the use of violence by female adolescents for the first time was granted categorical significance in its own right. Though alarm bells had been sounded intermittently over the course of American history, warning of female youths engaging in increasing levels of delinquency, for the most part, the behaviors precipitating those public outcries were so-called sexual improprieties or offenses such as disorderly conduct, shoplifting, forgery, and larceny, not person crimes involving violence.¹⁴

Though these earlier infractions raised anxiety about moral slippage, they did not cast female juveniles as an imminent threat to society.¹⁵ By the mid 1990s, however, the percentage rise of female juvenile violence stood out in high relief against the statistics on record for girls. Existing theories, most of which portrayed girls as being averse by nature to inflicting harm, could no longer even keep up the appearance of being sound and begged for observers to reconsider girls in relation to violence in a more-complex way and essentially anew.¹⁶

Although arrest rates for both male and female juvenile violent crime markedly declined after the mid 1990s, the far smaller decrease in female violence subsumed within this larger trend especially needed explanation. For example, longitudinal data revealed that the incidence of female juvenile violence had increased annually as a percentage of the total violent crime index since 1987; said another way, though the violent crime rate had decreased for all groups, the proportion of violent crime by females in relation to boys actually continued to increase. According to the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP), the total arrest rate for girls in 2001 (112 per 100,000) was 59% above its 1980 rate (70 per 100,000), while the 2001 rate for boys (471 per 100,000) was 20% below its 1980 rate; girls accounted for 23% of juvenile arrests for aggravated assault nationwide, 32% of simple assaults, and 18% of the total violent crime index in 2001.¹⁷ Stated from another angle, the arrest rate for simple assaults in 2003 was more than triple the amount (483.3 per 100,000) of the arrest rate for simple assaults by girls in 1980 (129.7 per 100,000) (Zahn et al., 2008). While these figures suggest that girls’ violence had come into its own “statistically,” the collective sociocultural processes embedded in these trend lines were poorly understood.¹⁸ What was clear was that the incidence of physical aggression captured in these figures challenged the notion that girls were anathema to committing violence in kind. The numbers could no longer be seen as characterizing a relatively few girls who had lost their way.

I do not seek here to join the debate over whether the increased number of girls arrested for violent offenses in America today represents a genuine shift in the psyche of female youth toward violence or is the artifact of stricter sentencing laws;¹⁹ historica...