Dead End Kids: Gang Girls and the Boys They Know

Introduction

Introduction Dead End Kids is a firsthand account of the lives of adolescents in a youth gang called the Fremont Hustlers in Kansas City, Missouri. I describe the social and economic pressure on these youngsters and the social arrangements and economic adaptations caused by that pressure. More specifically, I explore how parental neglect, household poverty, crime, and drug addiction induce social and emotional malignancies in these adolescents' lives. Aggravating and intensifying these youngsters' anguish and real-life problems is the neglect of an entire midwestern city, whose law enforcement and civic leaders have overlooked their moral obligation to safeguard children's well-being and have instead pursued an aggressive strategy to lock away disruptive children and keep them out of sight. Dead End Kids offers an insider's perspective and views youth-gang life through the eyes of a teenage gang girl. I call her Cara. Cara's life is a weave of drugs and guns, shootings and assaults, boyfriends and pregnancies, ratty apartments, broken-down cars, minimum-wage jobs, strained relationships with family members and peers, dodging the police, and praying for peace. You'll take a close look at Cara's world and meet other gang girls and the boys they know. These boys are cold. They abuse the girls, father their children, and then abandon them and the babies until they again need something from the girls. My bond to Cara was long and personal. Our relationship is a central theme in her story. I tried my best to "save" Cara and pull her off the street. I opened the doors to a private high school and led her in a direction I thought she wanted to go. In the end, however, Cara chose her own path, and it took her back to the street and to girls like her close companion Wendy. Cara's story isn't complete without Wendy, who is one of the Fremont Hustlers' founding members, a girl who described herself to me in our first conversation inJuly 1994 as a "straight G," a girl who succeeds in the gang life by doing the things boys do.l Cara and Wendy's world is filled with anguish and fear, joy and anger, frustration and rejection, and fantasies of gingerbread houses and lovers who'll rescue them from poverty, lousy jobs, jalopies, and broken promises. 3 4 Introduction Nearly all Cara's teenage years were spent as Wendy's companion. In a real sense, these teenage girls have been sisters in the street struggle. By the end of my research, they had lost small battles against the street and couldn't find the strength to forsake its dead-end lifestyle. However, they each fought with a never-ending zeal and a remarkable sense of optimism. In Dead End Kids, Cara and her male and female companions are called kids. Had they attended school, they'd have walked through locker-room doors labeled "boys" and "girls." Let's not lose sight of that as I take you into the dark world of a youth gang, where these kids are pursued, arrested, and labeled as gang members, juvenile delinquents, drug dealers, drug addicts, burglars, thieves, and, in some cases, killers. Indeed, these labels fit the Fremont Hustlers, but I'll show you that these kids are much more than those labels. Dead End Kids isn't specifically about the mistreatment of young children; however, I can't tell the story of the Fremont Hustlers without talking about the horrors of family life. Family abuse and neglect for Fremont kids has happened over at least two generations. The kids I studied have been neglected and/or abused, and now they abuse and ignore their own kids with the ease and thoughtlessness of selling $10 bags of marIJuana. Fremont research reaffirms Beggars and Thieves'2 child-protection policy, which argues for the development of a national, federally funded network of group homes or orphanages in which children can grow up in a healthy and safe environment. Dead End Kids argues for safe havens for gang girls and their children. Fremont research shows vividly that teenage gang parents don't rear their children safely. The rearing of children inside a youth gang and the socioeconomic functions that are imputed to pregnant teenagers and their babies are this book's two most important issues in our consideration of gang prevention and intervention. "Children having children" and rearing them in vile and dangerous places is a scene beyond your wildest nightmare...