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It has been posited that the juvenile justice system was designed around the needs of boys, who traditionally have constituted the majority juvenile court-involved population. As girls have become a larger and better understood minority in this system, however, scholarship has begun to recognize their specific pathways and needs. Chapter 4 focuses on gender and violent offending, emphasizing the most recent empirical evidence on similarities and differences in boys’ and girls’ violent behavior. The chapter addresses the following questions: What proportion of violent crimes do male and female youth commit? Are boys and girls becoming more or less violent? Why do youth behave violently in the first place, and why do girls seem to be less violent than boys? What can protect boys and girls from committing violent behavior? How do race, ethnicity, and gender impact violence and the juvenile justice system’s response to it? What are the potential young adult outcomes of violence among girls? Finally, what can we do about boys’ and girls’ violence, and what do we still need to learn in order to respond to appropriately?

We take up the subject of peer and school-based culture for teens in chapter four, where we outline at the femininity norms confronting female teens. In this chapter we note that notions of femininity were complicated and sometimes contradictory. In this way, girls’ violence is viewed against the backdrop of multiple constraints and contradictions.

This chapter provides a sense of what girls' violence “looks like from the street” by focusing on how girls in the Melrose Park and Lee neighborhoods experience causing physical harm, as well as the meanings they assign to doing so. It also considers the factors that drive a girl to engage in a fight, how girls construct and negotiate elements of identity and status through the practice of physical violence, and what instrumental value that engaging in violence has for them. It shows how fighting solidifies peer relations for girls and allows them to express their youthful exuberance. Moreover, it discusses the involvement of the criminal justice system in the life of a girl and the ways that street fighting serves as a kind of proving ground for girls to build up a sense of invulnerability and fearlessness.

This book has investigated the confluence of social, cultural, and individual factors that account for the physical violence among girls in the low-income neighborhoods of Melrose Park and Lee in Philadelphia. It has shown that girls resort to street fighting for reasons that are far more complex than the stereotypes and generalities that have often been put forward to explain their aggressive behavior imply. It has provided evidence that youth violence in low-income neighborhoods, whether carried out by males or females, is in large part a reaction to a sense of actual and perceived threat, as well as a compensatory attempt to increase a sense of security in both concrete and psychological terms. This concluding chapter offers some suggestions to truly understand the dynamics of girls' violence patterns in inner cities and what it means when girls fight.

Chapter three examines girls’ early childhood experiences in families and at school, and we highlight the pressures that girls uniquely experienced while growing up. We look at how girls’ family responsibilities, dress, demeanor, and their status in families and at school were constrained by numerous gender inequalities – a set of conditions that the girls thought of as inherently unfair and “unjust.” Considering these pressures, some girls spoke and struck out against those who harassed and targeted them, sometimes violently.

This chapter explores the role played by family and peers in the Melrose Park and Lee neighborhoods in socializing a girl to use violence and supporting her image as a fighter. More specifically, it considers the double-generation dynamic where mother and daughter fight side by side. It shows that there are mothers who had a history of fighting when they were younger, and that some even continue to engage in street fights. It shows that the girls' reliance on peers, female relatives, and even their mothers to come to their aid if outnumbered in a fight is an integral part of the anatomy of girls' violence. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the cultural and social dimensions of the mother-daughter alliance with regard to physical violence.

This chapter examines how social movements have addressed the increase in rape and other forms of violence against girls and women in Haiti after the earthquake. It first considers the work of the Commission of Women Victim to Victim, a group of rape survivors and former child slaves promoting women's and children's rights. It then recounts the story of a four-year-old rape victim, before discussing how women's advocacy has come with a price, or rather many prices, including attacks by perpetrators. It also explores the elusiveness of post-rape health care in Haiti and the factors that account for the decline in the security of girls and women in the country.

This chapter describes an approach, dubbed Get Savi (Students Against Violence Initiative), for tackling gender based violence (GBV) in university communities. Get Savi was developed and delivered in Scotland between 2012 and 2015. The chapter first provides an overview of the broader policy and political context in which the Get Savi programme was developed, with particular emphasis on the importance of a political consensus around the causes of violence against women and girls (VAWG). It then examines the practical process underlying the development of the Get Savi programme, along with the role of partnerships in the development and in the re-imagining of the prevention education programme for a Scottish audience. Finally, it considers some of the ongoing challenges and draws together learnings from the project to make recommendations for future policies and programmes on prevention education for student communities in the UK and beyond.