Fighting for Her Honor

Abstract

Since the 1980s, delinquency researchers and urban ethnographers have increasingly placed girls’ violence in the center of their inquiries. Within recent scholarship, there are several looming questions such as how much of girls’ violence is shaped by the same forces motivating violent boys and how much is shaped by concerns unique to girls. This study draws on data from a 6-year qualitative study of violence among Pacific Islander high school students in Hawaii. We explore how girls’ violence attends to gender as well as to the rampant economic, racial, ethnic, and political dislocations that threatened family survival in adolescents’ communities.