Читать книгу The Invisible Woman - Joanne Belknap - Страница 74

Schaffner (1999) stresses the need to examine girls’ delinquency by contextualizing their experiences as a means of understanding the decisions girls make. Specifically, she describes how the social, political, and economic sexualizing of female adolescence can result in girls’ harmful framings of their sexuality and role expectations, and she notes how some girls “solve” school, peer, and family problems through sex. Schaffner identifies four ways that the sexualization of girls’ lives can be manifested in delinquency or perceptions of delinquency: (1) girls who are oppositional, resistant, or angry about the stereotypically prescribed gender roles; (2) girls whose empty family lives (abandonment or neglect by parents) result in them ending up with (much) older boyfriends; (3) girls who get “caught” in a homophobic system for exploring lesbian desire; and (4) girls with sexual injury in the form of abuse that results in anger, running away, drug use, and so on.

As previously noted, sexual minority status (SMS) is the term most often used in scholarly studies to refer to people who are gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender (abbreviated “trans”), queer, or intersex. Conover-Williams’s (2014) extensive study using Add Health data found that both SMS youths and males were overrepresented in self-reported nonviolent offending, and males disproportionately self-reported violent offending (vis-à-vis females), but the SMS was not always significant in the overall violent offending models. Research on sexual identity and crime is fairly recent and tends to find that SMS (lesbian, gay, bisexual) girls are more likely to be labeled delinquents or arrested than either SMS boys or non-SMS girls, and this is particularly true for SMS girls of Color (Belknap, Holsinger, et al., 2012; Conover-Williams, 2014; Himmelstein & Brückner, 2011). In the only study examining the impact of gender identity on offending, in a sample of 843 college women, Dolliver (2019) found that in comparison to women with feminine, androgynous, and undifferentiated gender identities, the women with masculine identity (18% of the women) were more likely to engage in offending, in general (i.e., academic cheating, minor drug use, and vandalism), and aggression, specifically.

Panfil and Peterson (2015) argue that gang research always assumes “a heterosexual male subject as a starting and reference point…. However, gangs and their members are much more diverse than some might assume” (p. 208). But they also note that even male gang scholars publishing in the 1960s reported that some members (7% of African American and 14% of white) “had participated in ‘homosexuality’” (p. 218). Unfortunately, most of the research on gay and bisexual gang members is on boys, and very little is known about gay and bisexual female gang members. An exception is D. E. Johnson’s (2014) work on lesbians forming or becoming members of gangs “both preemptively and in retaliation to [homophobic] harassment” (p. 104). She also notes how “young lesbians of color have always navigated life in the borderlands” and stresses that their resistance to sexual harassment is viewed as an “assault” on the masculinity of the male harassers, whose threats pay “into the fear of the lesbian body[,] specifically the male lesbian body” (p. 107).