Much of the research on gangs has ignored females or trivialized female gangs. The message of these studies was that female gangs were not important. Given the lack of research, much of what has been written about female gangs and then reproduced in textbooks has been based on the reports of journalists and social workers and on the statements of male gang members. This paper considers the underlying reasons

Several national programs have made efforts to reach females. Notable among these are programs created by the Boys and Girls Clubs of America that are directed at reducing or eliminating gangs and the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, Intervention, and Suppression, which is directed at gang-involved youth and their communities. OJJDP program includes efforts addressed to females who are or who have been gang members. These programs offer a foundation to build on, but much more work needs to be done to address the needs of females involved with gangs.

The reasons for joining gangs are as follows: friendship, solidarity,

Regardless of the cultural aspect, there is one constant in the later life of most female gang members: most have children. Most gang members also have children, but the consequences are greater for females. When male gang members were asked about major turning points in their teens and twenties, they usually talked about major the gang, drugs, or arrests. In contrast, females referred to motherhood and marriage. Although most males abandoned responsibility for their children, most females reared their own children. In Milwaukee, as gang involvement in the drug business became riskier, women with children were more likely to opt for safer, even if less helpful, means of support.

Gangs are studied because they are of social concern. That concern stems from typically masculine acts of vandalism, violence, and other serious threats. It was often assumed that females did not take part in such behavior, so early researchers were not interested in the delinquency of female gang members. Researchers and journalist saw gangs as a quintessentially male phenomenon. Thus, most early reports focused on whether female gangs were real gangs or merely shadows of male groups. One review concluded that in these earlier studies, girls were defined solely in terms of their relations to male gang members (Cambell, 1990, p.166).

Are they sex objects or tomboys? Individual females are portrayed in terms of their sexual activity, with an occasional mention of their functions as weapon carries for male gang members. The behavior of the girls seems to be predicated on the assumption that the way to get boys to like you was to be like them rather than sexually accessible to them. Sex object and tomboy are both variants of the bad girl role. Good girls are modest and feminine, bad girls are not.

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