Why Girls Fight: Female Youth Violence in the Inner City

Abstract

This article considers the resort to violence by inner-city female youth, including the external forces impinging on them. In addition to underscoring that girls actively pursue and enjoy physically dominating others, I argue that the incidence of violence by girls in low-income areas, particularly “street fighting,” has been significantly underestimated in official statistics and generally by scholars. Engaging in violence was found to serve a number of functions for inner-city girls, similar to their male counterparts. Mothers were found to play an integral role in the anatomy of their daughters’ use of violence. The article addresses the need to situate girls’ violent behavior simultaneously on the level of individual psychology, on the cultural landscape of a neighborhood, and within the institutional framework that shapes both, in order to contextualize it properly. The article also considers how the method of ethnography is well suited to this end.