PART I
REAL TRENDS IN FEMALE VIOLENCE:
GETTING TOUGH ON GIRLS
ONE
HAVE âGIRLS GONE WILDâ?
Mike Males
Britney, Paris, Lindsay ⌠poster girls-gone-wild for âthe new normalcy of addiction for young womenâ and âthe dwindling state of young women's mental health,â as one progressive author declares (Martin, 2007, 2007a)? Drunken driving, hard drugs, crazed standoffs, wild hookup sex, even beatings and gunsâare pop starlets run amuck the new American Everygirl?
The modern young woman is âa bubbling, acid pit of guilt and shame and jealousy and restlessness and anxiety,â announces feminist Courtney Martin (Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters, 2007: 4). âWe are more diseased and more addicted than any generation of young women that has come before ⌠succumbing to dangerous emotional numbsâeating disorders, binge drinking, and even harder drugsâ (Martin, 2007a). Worse, adds Loyola University Chicago psychologist James Garbarino, shocked Americans are witnessing a ârecent, dramatic increase in violence by troubled girlsâ (See Jane Hit, 2006: 15). Harvard School of Public Health professors Deborah Prothrow-Stith and Howard Spivak warn of âincreased rates of girlsâ arrests for violent crime, including homicideâ (Sugar and Spice and No Longer Nice, 2005: 48).
So, what else is new? Every older generation recycles the same panics about girlsâperpetually shocking sexual precocity, drinking, muggings, insanityâdecade after decade. The 1940s and â50s, for example, brought a barrage of government-sponsored docudramas featuring lusty teen girls seducing and robbing innocent men, laughingly gunning down motorists, dying in gunfights with cops. âThey start with stealing lipstick, finish with a slaying!â blared âfrank truthâ films like Girls Under 21, Girls of the Night, So Young So Bad, Delinquent Daughters, and Girls in the Night. Best-selling early-1950s books blazoned busty, fist-clenched, gun-brandishing teen girls and titles like The Young and Violent, Jailbait, Juvenile Jungle, Teenage Crime Wave, Live Fast Die Young, and (my favorite) I'll Fix You. Major magazines like Life, Reader's Digest, and Ladies Home Journal warned that hundreds of teenage âpickupâ girls as young as twelve were making âthe sex delinquency of young girlsâ the worst problem cities faced. âAre These Our Children?â (Look, 21 September 1942) and âBoston's Bad Girlsâ (Pic, 17 August 1943) clarioned âEverytown, USA,â terrorized by girls gone berserk: âArrests for drunkenness of girls are up 40 percent ⌠prostitution, 64 percent ⌠truancy cases are up 400 percent ⌠sex offenses involving teen-age girls, up 200 percent ⌠the average age of offenders is fifteen âŚâ (Barson & Heller, 1998: 35, 38). Everything, in short, but Debbie Does Nukes.
Still, the attacks on girls today, reflecting the same bizarre combination of sympathy for girlsâ presumed female delicateness and fury at girlsâ assumed aggressiveness, appear to be setting new records for ferocity. Popular psychologist-author Mary Pipher's Reviving Ophelia (1995, 1998) brands girls âmoody, demanding, and distant ⌠sullen and secretive ⌠depressed ⌠overwhelmed ⌠anorexic ⌠alcoholic ⌠traumatized âŚâ and âfragile ⌠saplings in a hurricaneâ of âeating disorders, school phobias, self-inflicted injuries ⌠great unhappiness ⌠anxiety âŚâ (all that before we're halfway through her first chapter!). In Queen Bees and Wannabesâ first 15 pages, Rachel Wiseman (2002) calls girls âconfused,â âinsecure,â âlashing out,â âtotally obnoxious,â âmoody,â âcruel,â âsneaky,â âlying,â âmean,â âexclusive,â and âcatty.â âGIRLS ARE MEAN,â emphasizes Girl Wars coauthor Cheryl Dellasega (referring to those who haven't gone through her ârelational aggressionâ program), and âthe seriousness of these behaviors is reaching new proportions, resulting in criminal charges, school shootings, and suicidesâ (Dellasega & Nixon, 2003: 4).
Books by scholarly and professional authors, punditsâ commentaries, and mass-media splashes on girlsâ ânewâ pathologies have adopted the same sensationalism, titillation, and stereotyping that can only be termed poisonous. The detail that none of the commentators knew the Gloucester, Massachusetts, high school girls they falsely accused of forging a âteen pregnancy pactâ did not temper the media's factless disparagements (Kingsbury, 2008), repeated in commentatorsâ later vilifications of the pregnancy of 2008 Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin's 17-year-old daughter. CBS Evening Newsâ crusade against girls, including inflammatory reports on binge drinking (6 May 2007), Internet âdangersâ (19â22 November 2007), and violence (19 January 2007), typified the mind-numbingly identical girl-bashing reports. All featured dire alarms by self-interested sources and zero genuine evidence (unless staged videos of a minor scuffles, a girl's slap in a Harry Potter movie, and âPowerpuff Girlsâ cartoons are âevidenceâ). But when Pennsylvania State University criminologist Darrell Steffensmeier (et al., 2005) and the Department of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention's Girls Study Group (Zahn, 2007) released comprehensive compilations of decades of solid measures showing that girlsâ violence had not risen, commentators and the major media couldn't get interested.
What are we to make of today's seemingly irrational fear and hostility toward girls? An important factor driving modern girl-fearing may be racial change. Four in 10 girls and young women under age 25 today are black, Latina, Asian, or otherwise of color, dramatically larger percentages than in older generations. Most girl-fearing commentators are white, but they have been joined by some prominent, older African Americans such as entertainer Bill Cosby (2004; see also Dyson, 2005) and pundits Juan Williams (2007), Earl Ofari Hutchinson (2007), and Bob Herbert (see Males, 2004) who also echo racist stereotypes that characterize black girls as increasingly promiscuous and violent (see sidebar).
SAN FRANCISCO'S SHAME
Crude racial and sexual stereotypes toward girls have real consequences, even in the modern era and the most liberal of cities. In San Francisco, the press, police, and interest groups obsessively ignited inflamed panics toward âgirl gangsâ and crime, ballooning minor assaults into unheard-of crises. Perhaps it's no surprise, then, that African American girls, who comprised just 13% of the city's girls in 2007, suffered four-fifths of girlsâ drug arrests and 70% of girlsâ incarcerations. Astoundingly, San Francisco black girls suffer more drug arrests numerically than black girls in Los Angeles (a city whose black population is 20 times larger) and are 15 times more likely to be arrested for drugs than black girls elsewhere in California.
Do San Francisco's black girls suffer extraordinary drug problems, then? Other than arrest, no. California Department of Health Services and Drug Abuse Warning Network reports show that African American females under age 20 accounted for none of San Francisco's 5,000 overdose deaths and fewer than one-half of 1% of hospital emergency cases involving illicit drugs over the last decade. In contrast, two-thirds involved whites, 61% involved males, and 60% were over age 35 (San Francisco Juvenile Probation Department, 2007).
Repeated efforts by the author on behalf of the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice to obtain explanations from San Francisco human rights, police, and political agencies for the city's drastically excessive arrests of black girls brought only evasion and indifference. In a progressive city whose burgeoning drug abuse crisis is inconveniently centered in white middle-aged menâa wealthy, powerful constituency politicians, interests, and press covetâthe usefulness of scapegoating black girls clearly un...