Fighting for Girls: New Perspectives on Gender and Violence

INTRODUCTION

1 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 1 INTRODUCTION Meda Chesney-Lind and Nikki Jones A decade into the twenty-first century, it seems like the news about girls is increasingly alarming. Of course, we’ve always had “bad” girls. Longfellow , no less, penned, that “when she was good she was very good indeed, and when she was bad, she was horrid” (Longfellow, 2004). In the waning decades of the twentieth century, though, the public was jolted by media images of “gangster” girls, every bit as menacing as their urban male counterparts , often pictured glaring at the world over the barrel of a gun. The new century also introduced us to suburban “mean” girls, manipulating and backstabbing their way to popularity, and now, only a few years later, it seems as though our mean girls have suddenly turned violent. YouTube videos of brawling cheerleaders make local and national news and “go viral” on the Web where they are viewed by thousands. Do we really need to worry about girls causing “savagery in the suburbs” (Meadows & Johnson, 2003: 37), as a 2003 headline in Newsweek warned? It would certainly seem so if you picked up recent trade books like See Jane Hit (Garbarino, 2006) and Sugar and Spice and No Longer Nice (Prothrow-Stith & Spivak, 2005), which purport to advise parents and teachers on what to do about girls’ violence while also fueling public unease about modern girlhood. Given the high level of public and academic interest in girls’ use of violence and aggression, it is actually remarkable that so little careful academic work has been made available to those concerned with the facts and not the hype. This book fills this void by making two major contributions to the discussion of girls’ aggression and violence. One is to challenge the widely accepted notion that girls are “more violent” than in the past—a perception that has largely fueled the media panic about “girls gone wild.” These panics about girls’ violence are not only ungrounded, but are also potentially quite harmful for poor girls of color. The most punitive consequences of this twenty-first-century crackdown on violent girls is likely to be felt most by girls who live in heavily policed urban neighborhoods and attend troubled inner-city schools that enforce “zero-tolerance” policies. Using a wide variety of empirical sources, this book lays out data that demonstrates how changes in the policing of girlhood and changes in girls’ structural and situational 2 FIGHTING FOR GIRLS circumstances, rather than essential changes in girls’ behavior, largely explains the significant increases in girls arrests, particularly for simple assault. This book challenges the simplistic and somewhat contradictory notion that girls use of violence is somehow inherent in their personalities and a product of them becoming “more like boys” in the new millennium. We offer a number of chapters that challenge the notion that supporting girls’ efforts to seek equality in sports or in the classroom—that is, encouraging their efforts to seek and maintain equality with men and boys—will somehow produce unintended consequences like equity in crime. We present cutting -edge research on the contexts that encourage violent behavior among girls, and we show that addressing the unique problems that confront girls in various settings, such as in dating relationships, in damaged families, in school hallways and classrooms, and in distressed urban neighborhoods could go a long way to reducing girls’ use of violence. Thus, rather than framing girls and their behavior as “the problem,” the chapters in this book focus on how social settings shape girls’ responses to potential threats of violence and victimization and the often punitive institutional response to girls’ actions. The chapters also highlight the importance of the backgrounds of girls who have used violence. Often using girls’ own voices, the authors discuss how and why girls came to use violence in certain situations. These chapters encourage us to pay attention to the degree of trauma found in girls’ pasts, as well as the high levels of violence in their families, neighborhoods, and schools, all of which combine to produce girls who use violence in these settings. Many of the poor, young women of color whose voices are featured in the pages of this volume explain very powerfully how the situations they found themselves in encouraged their use of violence; their stories stand in contrast to popular media images that repeatedly construct female victims as white, middle-class suburban girls who have “gone wild.” In pulling this book together, we, as the editors...