As Bad as They Wanna Be

At Harvard not long ago, a group of prominent social scientists was mapping out a vast study on the roots of violence in children. It would be a massive, 10-year undertaking, centered in Chicago and focusing on the factors that steer young males toward delinquency.

Girls seemed somewhat incidental, the team led by child psychiatrist Dr. Felton Earls unapologetically maintained. In 1994, after all--the most recent year for which the National Center for Juvenile Justice has compiled statistics--girls accounted for only one-quarter of all juvenile arrests.

In context, however, that figure took on different significance. Between 1989 and 1993, the center reported, arrests of girls rose by 23%, double the increase for boys. For violent crimes, arrests for young females increased by 125% from 1985 to 1994. In the same period the increase for young males was 67%.

To fully understand the pathology of youth crime, the Harvard researchers finally decided to include girls in their study. “We came to our senses, you might say,” Earls explained.

These investigators were no less perplexed than much of the culture at large. To many people, “girl delinquency” sounds like a contradiction in terms. The notion of girls pounding other students--and, for that matter, teachers--as early as middle school seems more shocking, somehow, than when the same thing is said about boys.

But logically, that double standard makes no sense, for many girls are raised in the same atmosphere of poverty, hopelessness and family disintegration as boys. For girls, the miasma is compounded by widespread physical, sexual and emotional abuse. Some girls are also living out a troubling interpretation of feminism that contends, basically, that girls can do anything boys can do, and just as well. Including breaking the law.

“We can compete with boys, even for the bad things, absolutely,” said Mary Dederick, Los Angeles County probation director. “Girls are holding their own in sports and in schools. Half the population in medical schools and law schools is female now. We should be grateful that half of our delinquent population isn’t girls.”

At birth, male children are greeted with an adage, boys will be boys, that excuses all manners of misbehavior. But girls who challenge social norms--not to mention the law--present puzzling paradoxes. And if the experts are confounded by what propels them, the girls are frequently just as nebulous.

They are like Carla, a heavy, dark-haired 16-year-old who appropriated an assortment of underwear from a JCPenney store in the San Fernando Valley. “I wasn’t thinking anything,” said Carla, wedged between her parents as she waited to meet her probation officer. “I just took it.”

Or they are like Christina, who removed a car parked in San Francisco of its radio--not a very good radio at that. Willowy and blond, Christina spent her 17th birthday in the spartan confines of San Francisco’s Youth Guidance Center. She took the radio, she said, “because it was there.”

Most studies of delinquency continue to focus on boys--whose numbers, and whose violence, make them more of a threat to society. As a consequence, however, “We really don’t know how to deal with these girls,” Earls said.

But experts agree that objectively, girls are no less vulnerable than boys to the factors that experts say drive boys to crime. Poverty, drugs, violence and family disintegration obey no gender lines as they surround record numbers of American children. “There’s nothing on the X chromosome that prevents us from engaging in behavior that boys do rather routinely,” said University of Hawaii criminologist Meda Chesney-Lind, author of “Girls, Delinquency and Juvenile Justice” (Brooks / Cole, 1992). “There’s not an inoculation that we take at birth.”

As small children, girls and boys alike are raised in homes and communities that Jane Knitzer, a psychologist at the National Center for Children in Poverty in New York, points out are themselves increasingly perilous. “Most of the research, the attention, starts looking at violence in adolescence,” Knitzer observed. “But as children from birth to age 6, these kids are walking over dead bodies, hearing gun shots, witnessing stabbings.”

In observations, “we watch girls playing funerals in the doll corner,” Knitzer said. “These children are in a violent environment, and increasingly, they are becoming violent themselves.”

For girls, the violence is likely to have intensely personal implications. The great majority of delinquent girls reveal histories of physical, emotional or sexual abuse--with the high end on sexual. Intake surveys of young female offenders show a background of abuse in 50% to 70% of cases.

Those in the field, such as Dederick, say the rate is far higher. “Sex is always an overlay,” Dederick said. With so much mistreatment around them, “I think the girls are getting tougher,” she remarked. “Because they have to.”

A Personal Violence

Day in and day out, San Francisco public defender Patti Lee said she represents girls who “if they’re not getting beat up by their moms, they’re getting abused by their dads--maybe both.” Trite as it sounds, said Lee, whose office is in the basement of the Youth Guidance Center, “I think a lot of the girls end up here because they just haven’t had any love in their lives.”

Counseling girls at Camp Scott, the L.A. County probation department’s residential work camp in the Santa Clarita Valley, social worker Cheryl Morris said she is stunned repeatedly by the backgrounds of mistreatment she encounters. “For me, the most striking thing is the extent to which they have been victims before they become victimizers,” Morris said. “Even in intact, middle-class families, you scratch the surface and you find alcohol abuse, drug problems, terrible marital discord.”

One of Morris’ clients at Camp Scott, 17-year-old Nicole, said her mother’s boyfriend began molesting her when she was 3 years old. The abuse continued until she was 5, when the boyfriend moved on to another woman. Nicole said she was too young then, and too scared, to say anything about what she knew was wrong, and painful as well. Then at 9--the same year her real father died of a heroin overdose--Nicole saw a movie in which “some little girl was being molested.” She began screaming and throwing things around.

Nicole’s mother went to the police, but the child chose not to press charges. The ex-boyfriend had threatened her with death if she reported him. Nicole believed he meant business. A “GTA,” or grand theft auto, charge brought her first to L.A. County’s Kirby Center, a small residential facility for girls in the city of Commerce that emphasizes treatment. Later, a probation violation sent her to Camp Scott for nine months.

On the outside, Nicole said, she never attended school. Most of her friends smoke marijuana, “but that’s all they do. To be honest, that’s not a big deal where I live.” Nicole’s own habit was more dangerous--rock cocaine--an illustration, she said, of the temptations that drive girls to crime.

“You got 13-year-olds standing on street corners slinging drugs,” she said. “You got girls prostituting themselves to support their parents’ drug habits.”

Did you ever do that, Nicole?

“No way! I did it to support my own habit.”

Breaking the law may offer girls a peculiar form of credibility, suggested Harvard University professor Carol Gilligan, whose landmark examination of moral development in women, “In a Different Voice” (Harvard University Press, 1982), has become a feminist classic. “When girls act like boys, they are taken more seriously,” Gilligan explained--”as if, ‘Omigod! They are not doing what some people think girls do, which is sit home, get depressed and eat.’ ”

Rather than fighting physically, girls traditionally have excelled at verbal hostility. Girls fight with words “far more effectively than boys,” said Earls, of Harvard. By adolescence, Earls said, many girls are experts at using words for “the systematic demeaning of a person’s reputation and personality.”

Diversifying into the broader realm of criminal activity has apparently not compromised this skill. Bill Smith, a teacher at the Midvalley Community Education Center in Van Nuys, an alternative school for kids in the county probation system, said verbal defiance is one clear symptom of equal-opportunity toughness. “The girls, they compete with the boys to see who can be more verbally gross,” he said. “The girls hold their own quite well.”

Experts say that in the past, girls also have been more likely than boys to act out through self-destruction. Waging war on their internal hearths and homes--themselves--many girls choose the early years of adolescence to starve, to submit sexually and to endure abusive relationships with partners who may be no older than they are. Early adolescence also remains a peak time for girls to attempt suicide. Boys, too, may seek to end their lives in the turbulent years of adolescence. But the motive for the effort seems to vary with gender.

In a study of teenage girls who were at risk for early motherhood and dropping out of school, Gilligan said the suicide attempts were less a cry for attention than for credibility. “When they actually resorted to violence, in this case against themselves, other people took them seriously,” Gilligan said.

‘Families Are Failing’

Girl delinquency was not even on the agenda when an anti-violence program called the Omega Boys Club was established in San Francisco 10 years ago. But girls soon began showing up--numerically, on the charts of criminal offenders and in person--at the club’s Potrero Hill headquarters. While the original name remained, the focus broadened.

“The girls have been a very vocal part of what we’ve been doing,” said Jack Jacqua, an Omega founder who runs meetings for boys and girls incarcerated at the city’s juvenile jail. With girls, Jacqua said, “We see more numbers--and we see more attitude.”

Counseling girls in middle and high school, and responding to their calls on a violence prevention radio show, the club’s academic director, Margaret Norris, said she has come to believe that “the destructive behavior of girls often follows a pattern which has been set by older women.” Girls see the women around them caring too much for everyone else, Norris said--especially men who may not deserve this level of attention.

“They see women in abusive relationships, putting up with all kinds of abuse just to hold on to a man,” Norris said. “Our young girls have interpreted this to mean, ‘Let me do everything I have to do to get the eye of this boy. Even if that means I have to carry his gun, beat up some kids, whatever it takes to attract him.’ ”

Besides, Norris said, girls are just as susceptible as boys to crime’s perverse glamour. “It’s the same adrenaline rush that the boys get from it,” Norris said. “The girls like the excitement--the fast cars and the money--just as much as the boys.”

Again like boys, girls tend not to reflect on the potential consequences of criminal activity. “I don’t think they even think about it,” Norris said. “When they begin to think about it is after the fact, when they are in their bunk, in their cell. Maybe.”

Crumbling community resources and social services have taken a toll on young women and young men alike, said Maria Casey, head of the Urban Strategies Council, a think tank based in Oakland. “Increasingly, the systems that are set up to support young people and families are failing,” Casey said. “So that what plagues our young men also plagues our young women--a circle of factors that keeps our young people entrapped, if you will, in a web of adversity.”

The problems of parents who are unemployed--or parents who because they are employed are absent from the home--are only exacerbated by weakening neighborhoods, agreed Jeanne Dager, the assistant principal at the Midvalley Center. “We’ve sort of lost that neighbor-down-the-street mentality,” she said. “Now, if a neighbor tried to help out with a family problem, they’d tell him to mind his own business.”

About a quarter of her students at any one time are teen-age girls, Dager said. Like her male students, they are characterized by a powerful sense of hopelessness. It is not so much despair that besets them when they think about the future as it is denial.

“If they’re not in school, they’re on the streets, and they’re either shooting up drugs and we’ll find them dead in some alley--or they’re shooting each other and we’ll find them dead in some alley,” Dager said. “Just in the last week I’ve had a grief counselor out here three times to talk to kids whose friends got killed.”

As in the adult population, drugs drive more and more young women to crime as well. For many Southern California youth, much of the drug traffic centers around gangs. But even without gangs, drugs are so much a part of teenage culture that at one high school in the San Francisco area, the students say the security guard is a well-known dealer. Drugs also cleave families, said Chris Davenport, a psychiatric nurse at San Francisco’s Juvenile Hall.

Many of the girls in county custody have drug-addicted parents, “parents who are absent in a very profound way,” Davenport said. Drugs come to rule the family, moving the parents to go wherever they need to go and do whatever they need to do to satisfy their habits. That pattern leaves little room for parenting.

The influx of crack cocaine has proved particularly ravaging, said Davenport’s colleague Marynella Woods, a social worker. “A heroin addict can still parent, badly,” Woods said. But the urge to use crack and the drug’s super-potent high so dominate a user that even if the mother or father is physically present, for a child, that parent might as well be on the moon.

Too often, girls imitate the example, Davenport said. Fourteen-year-old Ayisha all but shrugged when she was busted for selling drugs, Davenport said. Her parents were substance abusers and so was her boyfriend, Ayisha told the nurse. “Her attitude was, ‘If they can do it, I can do it too,’ ” Davenport said.

Girls today also fall prey to the fabled cycle of violence, where generations of family members may be locked up at any one time. If more and more boys in the juvenile justice system are the sons of men who are or have been in prison, the record numbers of adult women behind bars today are just as likely to have daughters who may follow their example.

Tim Busby, warden at the California Rehabilitation Center in Norco, where inmates are treated for substance abuse, said most of the women in his facility are mothers. While little research exists specifically on the mother-daughter connection, Busby said that 63% of the children whose mothers are in custody end up in jail themselves. He added that “multi-generational situations”--where a grandmother, mother and daughter are all locked up--are increasingly less rare.

Having a father in jail also affects a daughter. Carlita, a 15-year-old at Camp Scott, said her father did time for robbery when she was a little girl. Two years after he got out, he was dead from an overdose.

Carjacking sent Carlita to Camp Scott. But, she joked, that’s not the only crime she committed--just the only one she got caught for. Three dots are tattooed below Carlita’s left eye, the symbol of “Mi Vida Loca”--my crazy life--that marks her as a gang member. She’s lost track of the number of drive-bys she’s participated in.

“My little sister, she’s 11, she just wrote to me,” Carlita said. Her face lit up with a grin of big-sisterly pride. “She said she wants to be just like me.”