One of the differences between boy gangs and girl gangs is for girls it's much more relational and much less violent.

If we socialized boys like girls, we would have a much lower crime rate in America.

The most dangerous kind of girl involvement with gangs is one where the girls are just sort of hanging around the gang boys or even being part of the male gang.

The gang may be a safer place than home, but it's not without its problems. In some instances, especially in the Latino community, the boys have very traditional views of femininity even though they are gang members. The girls can be [seen] as sexually available, but not the good girl that you want to take home to your family, even by young men in the gangs.

Girls come to the gang for very different reasons than boys. For boys in marginalized communities, they have a gender problem, and they solve it often through gang membership. They find an ability to do masculinity in a way that reasserts their importance in a society that mostly ignores them. For girls, they're coming out of more damaged backgrounds. Their families are often the reason they get propelled into gang membership.

Girls often feel very powerless in their lives and their families, and they kind of mimic the male violence as a way to try and get some of that male power that they see lacking in their own lives.

When some of the gangs got involved with the drug trade, particularlythe crack cocaine trade, and the lethal violence started to flare up in the '80s, then there was a great deal of public attention on gangs and a great deal of concern about what was going on in these social groups.