Читать книгу The Invisible Woman - Joanne Belknap - Страница 80

Research identifies seven gender comparisons, discussed in detail later, regarding individuals’ reasons and means of initiation into and continued use of alcohol and drugs (most research is on drugs). These comparisons include some of the themes addressed in Table 5.1, such as entry into sex work or trading sex for drugs and self-medicating to cope with trauma, anger, and depression. Other gendered reasons for the use of, and pathways to, drugs include who initiates a person to use drugs, the process and impact of adultification, and the complicated “doing masculinity” in terms of SUAS. First, although some research finds no gender differences in being introduced to drugs, other research claims women and girls are more likely to be introduced to drugs by husbands and boyfriends, whereas men and boys are more likely to be introduced by male friends (R. D. Evans et al., 2002; Inciardi et al., 1993; Lichtenstein, 1997). Moreover, women’s substance abuse can be a result of being in subordinate relationships with abusive partners (Richie, 2006) or, for girls, relationships with older men (Lopez, 2017). But research also suggests that many women and girls are introduced to drugs by girlfriends (Cutler, 2016; Sterk, 1999) and parents (Lopez, 2017; Sterk, 1999). Second, there is some indication that relative to girls and women, boys and men are more likely to use drugs recreationally, for pleasure and thrill-seeking (e.g., Cutler, 2016; Li et al., 2001), and relative to boys and men, girls and women are more likely to both begin and continue the use of drugs to self-medicate against depression and anger (Erickson et al., 2000; R. D. Evans et al., 2002; Inciardi et al., 1993; Mason et al., 2007). Notably, a study of woman crack users found that half started using in response to a traumatic experience or series of traumatic experiences (e.g., death in the family, losing a child, rape) (Erickson et al. 2000).

Third is girls’ disproportionate likelihood (relative to boys) of helping their mothers (and sometimes fathers) around the home and with younger siblings (Bottcher, 2001; Carbone-Lopez & Miller, 2012; Lopez, 2017). Specifically, adultification is the process by which girls “prematurely assume adult responsibilities in families.” Given that most delinquent girls grow up in single-mother homes, with “sporadic contact with biological fathers,” they are primarily helping their already over-taxed mothers (Lopez, 2017, p. 47). Lopez’s (2017) powerful book Complicated Lives: Girls, Parents, Drugs, and Juvenile Justice, poignantly and carefully documents both the agency and the struggles of girls involved in the juvenile system, with adultification as a central theme: “Adultified children have few support systems,” so they are playing adult roles, often with younger siblings, with few to no resources (p. 49). Simultaneously, many of these girls (understandably) feel “rejected, abandoned, and unloved” by their fathers, placing them in precarious roles with mythologizing their fathers to explain their abandonment (p. 62). Similarly, Paula Smith’s (2019) study of delinquent girls in Utah found a significant amount of abandonment by both fathers and mothers, parents who died, and a girl whose mother sold her into prostitution. This is not to say that these girls’ parents were all terrible. Lopez (2017) is careful to identify the ways that they were good parents in many difficult circumstances (e.g., extreme poverty, fathers being deported to Mexico), but she does so without excusing some of the parenting. The disadvantages linked with adultification place these girls at significant risk of “looking for love in the wrong places” and involvement in drugs. Girls with histories of drug-addicted mothers are at risk of disrupted relationships with their mothers, running away, becoming involved with much older boys and men, and alcohol/drug use and drug-selling (Carbone-Lopez & Miller, 2012; Lopez, 2017; Ryder & Brisgone, 2013).

Table 5.1

¹Strategies are listed in order of their frequency reported by the girls. Girls could report more than one strategy, so this adds up to more than 18.

Source: Lopez, V., Jurik, N., & Gilliard-Matthews, S. (2009). Gender, sexuality, power and drug acquisition strategies among adolescent girls who use meth. Feminist Criminology, 4(3), 226–251.

Fourth, research reports that boys and men’s alcohol and drug use are often motivated by means of “doing masculinity” (e.g., Cutler, 2016; R. D. Evans et al., 2002). Similarly, girls and women’s SUAS may also be a form of resistance; some girls and women report using drugs to “act out” against their parents, teachers, and sexist societal roles (Friedman & Alicea, 1995; Sterk, 1999). Similarly, Lopez (2009, p. 226) and her colleagues identified six “meth” procurement strategies, among 14- to 17-year-old girls, in “crafting their own version of femininity” to obtain meth on the streets (reported in Table 5.1). Perusing them, the social construction of gender is evident, but also the complicated manners in which the girls are resilient and find agency while they are simultaneously highly marginalized. Similarly, despite the horrific lives many researchers describe of crack-addicted women, some also find empowering aspects, including Maher (1997): “As it turns out, the women I studied were remarkable in many ways, but perhaps most of all for their resilience, their capacity for the hardest of labors, and the sheer tenacity of the struggles to survive” (p. x).