The Delinquent Girl, and: Between Good and Ghetto: African-American Girls and Inner-City Violence, and: Beyond Bad Girls: Gender, Violence, and Hype (review)

The authors of the three books I review here critically examine the realities of girls' delinquency. Margaret Zahn's edited volume, The Delinquent Girl, is a compilation of eleven book chapters explaining girls' delinquency from multiple and intersecting perspectives. Nikki Jones's Between Good and Ghetto: African-American Girls and Inner-City Violence is a long overdue in-depth analysis of African American girls' experiences with violence and aggression in inner-city ghettos. Meda Chesney-Lind and Katherine Irwin's Beyond Bad Girls: Gender, Violence and Hype compares the realities of girls' aggression to popular media hype around the "mean girl" folk devil.

The broadest investigation of girls' delinquency is found in Zahn's edited volume. The chapters were written by eighteen members of the Girls Study Group, a multidisciplinary group of academics and practitioners who study girls' delinquency and recommend prevention and intervention programs. This book explores various factors explaining girls' delinquency, discusses policy implications, and provides avenues for future study.

Chapters 1 (Robert Agnew) and 2 (Jody Miller and Christopher Mullins) begin the book with an examination of how mainstream and feminist theories of crime explain aspects of girls' delinquency. In chapter 3, Darrell Steffensmeier and Jennifer Shwartz compare trends in girls' and boys' delinquency and argue that the alleged increase in girls' delinquency may, in fact, be a result of stronger social controls on girls, rather than a rise in their delinquency. Chapter 4 (Diana Fishbein, Shari Miller, Donna Marie Winn, and Gayle Dakof) examines biopsychological factors of crime to show how psychological and biosocial factors (for example, stress, early puberty, and ADHD) differentially affect girls' and boys' delinquency.

The next six chapters, respectively, explore how familial (Candace Kuttschnitt and Peggy Giordano), peer (Peggy Giordano), school (Allison Ann Payne, Denise Gottfredson, and Candace Kruttschnitt), gender differences and neighborhoods (Margaret Zahn and Angela Browne), larger and intersecting contexts (Merry Morash and Meda Chesney-Lind), and gang relationships (Jody Miller) can affect girls' delinquency. Together, they indicate that girls' delinquency, in addition to having biopsychological causes, is influenced by the environment in which they live and grow. Thus girls' delinquency is the result of a complex network of various internal and external factors affecting girls on a day-to-day basis.

Finally, the author of chapter 7 (Barry Feld) outlines and compares longitudinal U.S. American trends in girls' delinquency, arrest rates, and sentencing trends to those of boys. For instance, although girls' arrest rates for simple assault are increasing while boys' are decreasing, Feld posits that this difference in rates reflects a change in police arrest practices, rather than a rise in girls' criminal behavior. Police tend to target girls more than boys for minor acts of violence and aggression (that is, simple assaults) that are uncharacteristic of traditional definitions of femininity and girlhood. Such gender differences in arrest rates also reflect boys' tendency to use weapons, which elevates their charges from simple assault to assault with a weapon.

Another significant point Feld presents is that, contrary to popular belief, youth delinquency and crime, particularly that of girls, is decreasing rather than increasing. This finding is consistent with other current research on youth delinquency, such as Mike Males's (2010), who found that girls today are much happier, more successful, less aggressive, and experience fewer arrests and criminal charges, with the exception of simple assaults, than they have historically. This has policy implications, since current youth-crime policy is designed under the assumption that youth crime and delinquency are rising.

Overall, the authors of The Delinquent Girl explore how gender, race, and class differences...