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.

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.

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

In the '60s and '70s, people didn't pay a lot of attention to gangs. I think gangs still existed, but gangs had fallen out of criminological favor.

Girls begin to have second thoughts about the violence. Studies show they feel a considerable amount of guilt about it. They feel bad later and want to apologize.

There's only one thing worse than not paying attention to girls in gangs - it's paying attention to girls in gangs. The public reaction to girls and women who engage in nontraditional behavior - the hysteria that often surrounds girls in these groups - is almost as interesting as the behavior itself.

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.