Читать книгу The Invisible Woman - Joanne Belknap - Страница 100

People, including police, rarely think of girls when envisioning gang members (D. Peterson, 2012). Studies vary widely in what they report as girls’ representation in gangs, ranging from 6% to half of gang members (Bjerregaard, 2002; Bjerregaard & Smith, 1993; Esbensen & Winfree, 1998; Felkenes & Becker, 1995; Gilman, Hill, Hawkins, Howell, & Kosterman, 2014; Pyrooz, Sweeten, & Piquero, 2013). Although the National Gang Center reports that girls consistently constituted around 7% of U.S. gang members between 1998 and 2010 (their most recent data) and that girls constitute increasingly higher percentages moving from larger cities to rural counties (National Gang Center, 2019), the scholarship on gangs in the most recent years indicates that girls’ proportion of gang members is much higher than 7%; indeed it was reported to be 24% (Gilman et al., 2014), 31% (Watkins & Melde, 2018), and 41% (Estrada, Gilreath, Astor, & Benbenishty, 2016; D. Peterson, 2012) in extensive studies.

Wing and Willis’s (1997) research on gangs, race, and gender notes the racism and sexism of “gangs” being perceived as synonymous with African American men’s criminality. Additionally, they are troubled by the invisibility of African American women’s roles in gang life. Wing and Willis (p. 244) identify six “frequently overlapping” roles of African American women’s gang involvement: (1) full-fledged members of their own, female-only gangs; (2) auxiliaries to male gangs; (3) gangsters in coed gangs; (4) girlfriends and wives of male gang members; (5) mothers of male gang members’ children; and (6) mothers, sisters, and daughters of male gang members. Thus, they conclude that African American women “have the capacity to affect gang members on profoundly intimate levels” and thus must play a pivotal role in providing solutions to the gang problem (p. 243).

Research on LGBTQI+ gang members is very new and Vanessa R. Panfil and Dana Peterson have been key in drawing attention to this gap (Panfil, 2014; D. Peterson & Panfil, 2014). Panfil’s (2017) book The Gang’s All Queer is not only ground-breaking in criminology and gang studies but also in queer studies, women studies, and gender and sexuality studies. Her sample is entirely gay men/boys in gangs that are partially or fully gay, and the participants are primarily African American (77%), then white (11%), biracial (9%), and Latinx (2%). One of the many fascinating comparisons with girls in gangs is society’s resistance to think someone could be a gay man/boy and be in a gang. Some of the men and boys reported their parents being far more upset that they were gay than that they were in a gang.