Female Gang Members

[The Streets Don't Love You Back]

Female Gang Members

Girls in the Hood are Often Ignored by Authorities

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Long considered an urban legend and historically dismissed or belittled by authorities, street gangs run by females are now recognized as a serious problem.

Street gangs have traditionally been composed of males; female gangs were considered mere wannabes, posturing adjuncts to the male-dominated crews. Attitudes are changing, however, as the 21st century has brought a discernable increase in violence and serious crime committed by the so-called wannabes.

Gang Units and Media Underrated Female Gang Membership

Police, the media, and the courts often refused to admit that female gangs committed criminal activity. In the 1940s, Mexican-American girls known as cholas formed Latino gang auxiliaries such as the Diablas, Las Monas, and the Black Legion. Often, these were no more than social clubs; but sometimes erupted into violence.

In response, the federal government vowed to crack down on the wearing of zoot suits, as their baggy cut could conceal knives or guns. Wipe out the male violence, the reasoning went, and the girls would blindly follow along. No one explained how a voluminous suit could exactly be considered a root cause of hooliganism.

In the 1950s, girls who “hung out” with gang members and were entrusted with the safekeeping of weaponry were called merely “knife molls” by the press, as if the ability to hide switchblades was the sum total of their personalities. This attitude usually helped them avoid prosecution; it also denied them any sort of help or real opportunity to escape their troubled environment.

All the way through the 1990s, this belief persisted. The Los Angeles gang manuals claimed that women played only non-essential criminal roles in gangs. Gang units primarily concentrated on males. Programs for females concentrated on hygiene and childcare, and were often available only to pregnant girls. During that same period, arrest rates for juvenile girls jumped by 82%. There was only a 25% increase for boys.

Girl Gang Problem Continues to Get Worse

There are currently 50 female crews in Washington, D.C. alone; twice as many as in the late nineties. Female gang membership is on the rise in other major cities as well. They fight with knives, bricks, ice picks, guns, box cutters, and razor blades; sell drugs; and commit violent crimes against citizens.

A journalist who interviewed girl gangs during the nineties heard gruesome stories of drive-bys, games of Russian roulette, and even rape of a rival gang member using an aluminum pole. Trapped in a world where no one seems to be noticing their worth, the gang gives members a valuable sense of identity that they can find nowhere else.

Girls Need Gang Intervention Programs to Reverse the Trend

In the New York of the fifties, social workers tried to get involved in juvenile delinquents’ family lives; only to be told by parents that the teenagers “were the court’s problem.” In the nineties, LA battered women’s shelters trying to intervene in girl gang members’ lives heard the same type of argument from unconcerned parents: “Not our problem.” The neglectful mind-set remains the same as the statistics worsen.

None of this is to argue that it is more important to help gang-affiliated girls than it is to aid young men and boys in the same situation. It is merely to state that equal time, effort, and resources should be expended on solving the problem of male and female gang violence.

According to the Bureau of Justice, the adult female jail and prison inmate population has increased about 5% per year from 1998 to 2004 (the male population rose by 3.3% per annum). Early intervention might prevent a girl gangmember’s budding talents and incipient skills from being wasted behind steel bars or on morgue slabs.

Sources

Davidson, Judge Irwin D. and Gehman, Richard, The Jury is Still Out, Harper and Brothers, 1959.

Moriconi, Lis Horta, “Girl Gangs on the rise, involved in violence in major cities in the USA,” Comunidad Segura, Dec. 7, 2006.

Sikes, Gini, 8 Ball Chicks: A Year in the Violent World of Girl Gangsters, Anchor Books, 1997

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