Meda Chesney-Lind Quotes

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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 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.

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.