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.

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.

Violence among boys is so valorized and so encouraged that you have to do things different in violence prevention with boys than with girls.

If you socialize people to care about each other and care about relationships, they tend to be much less violent and tend to think about the consequences of their actions more.

The girls go to the gang in order to get protection from victimization that's occurring in their lives. And also it's a place to be, because they're often rejected from and rejecting their families.

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.

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.