Girls come to the gang for ...

Girls come to the gang for very different reasons than boys. For boys in marginalized communities, they have a gender problem, and they solve it often through gang membership. They find an ability to do masculinity in a way that reasserts their importance in a society that mostly ignores them. For girls, they're coming out of more damaged backgrounds. Their families are often the reason they get propelled into gang membership.
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 Meda Chesney-Lind

Quotes from the same author

When some of the gangs got involved with the drug trade, particularlythe crack cocaine trade, and the lethal violence started to flare up in the '80s, then there was a great deal of public attention on gangs and a great deal of concern about what was going on in these social groups.
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 Meda Chesney-Lind
If you socialize people to care about each other and care about relationships, they tend to be much less violent and tend to think about the consequences of their actions more.
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 Meda Chesney-Lind