8 Ball Chicks: A Year in the Violent World of Girl Gangsters

I've just read the most fucked-up parenting ever. Ever. EVER. This is talking about Latino girls in gangs in LA. For her daughter's 16th birthday, the mother gave her a gun. She also threw her other daughter out for using the birth control pill. Is shooting people not a mortal sin too?

Apparently not, not even to the police if its a female gang member that does it, and not especially to the young girls who get guns for presents and think that gang-banging is just a phase, and they won't be doing it forever. No, they won't but the people they've killed are dead forever when they have moved on to more conventional lives.

This book is primarily about Latina gangs and African-American ones with scarcely a mention of a couple of fucked-up show more white girls. No matter their bravado and their feeling of being as bad, as down, as their men, they are adjuncts, they are girls after boys, girls wanting to belong to the gang, girls who just do because that's their neighbourhood. Girls are the same the world over when it comes to the reasons for belonging to groups, its just that these ones are murderously dangerous.

The book is excellent, its not a sociological survey as Sudhir Venkatesh's [b:Gang Leader for a Day: A Rogue Sociologist Takes to the Streets|3420054|Gang Leader for a Day A Rogue Sociologist Takes to the Streets|Sudhir Venkatesh|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1255903974s/3420054.jpg|1483174] which I read not long ago. The differences in style are that the author of 8 Ball does not identify with the girls she interviews and the sociologist very much does even though he pretends to be objective. The opposite of what you thought I was going to say? The opposite of what I thought I'd read! Sikes' book is the most readable, there are plenty of characters, most either pathetic and dangerous, just plain pathetic or you have hope for them (but they are still dangerous). Venkatesh is more into detailing the gangs as alternative business units run by men who, outside of their violence, are as varied and mean or generous and involved or not as businessmen everywhere with the main interest and their personal lives. You see not much hope for the men, and there really isn't is there? Black and Latino gang members don't have a long life span, or a long one as free men in general.

Its hard for a man to leave a gang when he comes to his senses and understands his own mortality; he may never get out alive. Its easier for a girl. In the warped moral code of the gangs, a mother should be home looking after her children, cooking for her man and hiding is drugs and weapons from the law, she shouldn't be out on the street gangbanging. And these girls are mothers so young so when they realise that there is the possibility of life, not death, and even of becoming someone in the real world, there is the way out. Some make really make it, others, dragged down by too many children, too much poverty and the easy access to drugs never will. Some of them may even grow up to buy their daughters their special sweet-16 gift of a gun. show less

The author embeds with female gang members and their larger gang and non-gang associates to go as far as she can (short of being present at crimes) to report on the activities, motivation and challenges of female gang members in LA, San Antonio, and Milwaukee. In LA it is a world matured since 60s zoot suit riot days, etc. while at stages of unacknowledged maturity in Milwaukee and a latent, emergent threat to the community in San Antonio. Gini gets very closes, as in friendship close, to some of her subjects and her close reportage with little fact checking or big picture makes for compelling, personalized reading (these miscreants and survivors are real people) obviously suggests issues of the impact of researcher involvement. Are show more they just talking and acting big because a journalist is in the room? What if they did not know they were being observed? show less

Interesting read, but very out of date for today's audience. This books covers the girl gangs in the late 80s and 90s, most of which were off-shoots of the Crips and Bloods. Will give you some basis for understanding today's gangs but that's about it.

There isn't much done on female gang members so if you need to do some research on the topic. This is your source.