50 female crews in Washington, D.C.

50 female crews in Washington, D.C. alone; twice as many as in the late nineties. Female gang membership is on the rise in other major cities as well. They fight with knives, bricks, ice picks, guns, box cutters, and razor blades; sell drugs; and commit violent crimes against citizens.A journalist who interviewed girl gangs during the nineties heard gruesome stories of drive-bys, games of Russian roulette, and even rape of a rival gang member using an aluminum pole. Trapped in a world where no one seems to be noticing their worth, the gang gives members a valuable sense of identity that they can find nowhere else.Girls Need Gang Intervention Programs to Reverse the TrendIn the New York of the fifties, social workers tried to get involved in juvenile delinquents’ family lives; only to be told by parents that the teenagers “were the court’s problem.” In the nineties, LA battered women’s shelters trying to intervene in girl gang members’ lives heard the same type of argument from unconcerned parents: “Not our problem.” The neglectful mind-set remains the same as the statistics worsen.None of this is to argue that it is more important to help gang-affiliated girls than it is to aid young men and boys in the same situation. It is merely to state that equal time, effort, and resources should be expended on solving the problem of male and female gang violence.According to the Bureau of Justice, the adult female jail and prison inmate population has increased about 5% per year from 1998 to 2004 (the male population rose by 3.3% per annum). Early intervention might prevent a girl gangmember’s budding talents and incipient skills from being wasted behind steel bars or on morgue slabs.

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