The Girls In The Gang Chapter Summary

The formation of subcultures was the main topic of discussion in Chapter 6. On page 158, there was a small section dedicated female gang members and a brief excerpt from The Girls In The Gang by Anne Campbell which described her observations. In “A Multisite Examination of Youth Gang Membership: Does Gender Matter?”, Ebensen and Deschenes set out to establish the differences between the attitudes of gang-membership between males and females. In order to measure the attitudes, Ebensen and Deschenes surveyed eighth-grade students across 11 U.S. cities using a cross-sectional research design (Esbensen and Deschenes 804). What they found was that males and females join gangs for different reasons. Females tend to join gangs when they feel socially isolated and have low self-esteem, where males tend join gangs under opposite circumstances such as a limited opportunity to thrive and a higher attachment to their mothers (Esbensen and Deschenes 812,-16). What these general findings show is that there are a variety of reasons that people join gangs.

Women are usually thought to commit nonviolent crimes such as prostitution or shoplifting (Adler, Mueller, and Laufer 49) and from there as Esbensen and Deschenes even mentioned, researchers tend to neglect connecting gang membership and the female gang involvement. Participation and involvement in what is considered to be “exclusive”, provides something for these young women. In regards to gender and crime, there has been more attention dedicated to women participating in crime. Freda Adler (1975) argued that the roles of women have changed socially and economically to accommodate the culture (Adler, Mueller, and Laufer 49), however can this argument be applied to female gang-involvement? It can to an extent be applied, however that argument only covers a small fraction of the reasoning behind a female