Gaslight, Gatekeep, GirlBoss: A Girl Gang Grab-Bag

Like most American Millennials, I was subjected to Drug Abuse
Resistance Education, or DARE. It was the typical kind of “Drugs
Are Bad, mmmkay?” sort of thing. Police officers would come to
school and show 2nd graders pictures of smoker lungs and suggest
that everyone and their mom would be peer pressuring you to smoke
weed and/or crack, which was not as big of an issue as some of us
might have hoped. During one such class, we were being taught about
the danger of gang violence and we were told to draw what we
thought a gang member would look like. Yes, it does sound like a
potentially extremely racist arts and crafts session, but yours
truly decided to get creative. I drew a woman wearing a crop top
and JNCO jeans. The DARE officer looked at my drawing and told me
that women weren’t ever members of gangs, but were usually
girlfriends, which made my tiny feminist hackles raise. What do you
MEAN there weren’t any lady gang members? Whatever men could do,
women could do, right? EQUALITY, RIGHT? If she had been prepared
for nuance beyond her vaguely racist lesson, she might have talked
about the culture of toxic masculinity that pervades most gangs as
we think about them today and often, women have to carve out their
own niche when it comes to organized crime. Officer Silva, this
one’s for you.

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Sources:
Heritage of Endurance: Family Patterns and Delinquency Formation in
Urban Japan By Hiroshi Wagatsuma, George A. De Vos
https://www.thegenealogist.co.uk/featuredarticles/2023/the-queens-of-the-forties-1683/
https://www.dannydutch.com/post/meet-the-forty-elephants-the-all-girl-gang-from-london
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0QZEnyZyYo4
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/00220094211018490

https://sos.oregon.gov/archives/exhibits/ww2/Pages/life-juveniles.aspx#:~:text=(Image%20source%3A%203%20)%20Wartime,year%20of%20World%20War%20II.  https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/001112875500100210?journalCode=cada
https://apnews.com/article/japan-gangsters-yakuza-crime-fdb57ffd2325fb3aba8c211a30b6c861
https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/tv/a60938449/under-the-bridge-manjit-suman-reena-virk-parents/
https://web.archive.org/web/20090801004713/http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/story/CTVNews/20060719/virk_killer_060719?s_name=&no_ads=
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/reena-virk-kelly-ellard-sim-1.7185366
https://www.vice.com/en/article/qvpqa7/the-unforgettable-story-of-a-bc-teen-murdered-by-her-peers
https://tspace.library.utoronto.ca/bitstream/1807/13803/1/MQ49780.pdf
https://www.vicnews.com/news/kelly-ellard-declines-chance-for-full-parole-says-shes-not-ready-


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