The plague of teen violence is an equal-opportunity scourge. Crime by girls is on the rise, or so various jurisdictions report. In Massachusetts, for instance, 15 percent of the crimes that girls were convicted of committing in 1987 were violent offenses, By 1991, that number had soared to 38 percent. In California, judges send the “hard core” girls to the Youth Authority’s Ventura School. “You name the crime, we have it; you think about the worst scenarios and we have them here,” says Edward Cue, a school official.
For some girls, the best defense is a good offense. “I’ve had fights with a lot of guys,” says Laura Morales, a South End, Boston, youth. Years ago, she concedes, a girl might have called a brother or a cousin to fight her battles. Today, says Morales, “if I have to take care of something, I’ll do it by myself.” A third-grade New Orleans girl recently took a .357 magnum to school to protect herself from a boy who was allegedly harassing her. After police confiscated the gun, she claimed that her complaints to the school officials had gone unheeded.
Girls are breaking into the traditionally male world of gangs, too. The Kings, one of San Antonio’s largest gangs, recently started accepting young women. Where male gang members used to refer to the girls as “hos and bitches,” says Sgt. Kyle Coleman of the Bexar County Sheriff’s Department Gang Unit, they’re a little more reluctant now as those female gang members start to equal them in fights and drive-by shootings. Girls join gangs for a variety of reasons: protection, fun, because they like a particular boy or for acceptance. The gangs also provide a makeshift family. Some teens will do anything to join. In one initiation rite in San Antonio, girls are kicked and beaten by half a dozen gang members.
In Boston, the two biggest female gangs are every bit as ruthless as the boys. “They’re shooting, stabbing, and they’re into drug sales and stickups,” says Tracy Litthcut, manager for the Boston Streetworkers violence-intervention program. In New York City, not only are packs of boys “whirlpooling,” or surrounding girls in public swimming pools and molesting them, but groups of girls are attacking other female swimmers as well. “I’ve been amazed at the brutality of the beatings of girls by other girls,” says Dr. Naftali Berrill, director of the New York Forensic Mental Health Group. The violence is a vicious, antisocial pack mentality aimed at a target who is incapable of fighting back, says Berrill. The pack smells weakness, and the situation turns into a free-for-all where no individual person feels responsible.
Social agencies haven’t learned much about curbing violence among young women. The police and social workers know only how to worry about whether the girls are pregnant, says Franlklin Tucker, director of the Barron Assessment Counseling Center, where students from Boston schools are sent if they are caught with a weapon on school grounds. “These young girls are very angry and very hostile,” he says.
They have their reasons some good, some not. Sheri Pasanen, a San Diego social worker, was caught short recently when she was showing the movie “Thelma and Louise” to a group of jailed young and older women. “When they shot the [attempted rapist], the whole class cheered,” she says. The problem, says Pasanen, is that their reaction was reasonable. “Every single one of them in there has probably been abused.” But if violence is a learned behavior, it can also be unlearned. And these inmates now have some time to work on that lesson.
