Meda Chesney-Lind Quotes

#1. The girls go to the gang in order to get protection from victimization that's occurring in their lives. And also it's a place to be, because they're often rejected from and rejecting their families.

Meda Chesney-Lind

#2. The most dangerous kind of girl involvement with gangs is one where the girls are just sort of hanging around the gang boys or even being part of the male gang.

Meda Chesney-Lind

#3. In the '60s and '70s, people didn't pay a lot of attention to gangs. I think gangs still existed, but gangs had fallen out of criminological favor.

Meda Chesney-Lind

#4. One of the differences between boy gangs and girl gangs is for girls it's much more relational and much less violent.

Meda Chesney-Lind

#5. If we socialized boys like girls, we would have a much lower crime rate in America.

Meda Chesney-Lind

#6. Girls often feel very powerless in their lives and their families, and they kind of mimic the male violence as a way to try and get some of that male power that they see lacking in their own lives.

Meda Chesney-Lind

#7. When some of the gangs got involved with the drug trade, particularlythe crack cocaine trade, and the lethal violence started to flare up in the '80s, then there was a great deal of public attention on gangs and a great deal of concern about what was going on in these social groups.

Meda Chesney-Lind

#8. If you socialize people to care about each other and care about relationships, they tend to be much less violent and tend to think about the consequences of their actions more.

Meda Chesney-Lind

#9. Girls begin to have second thoughts about the violence. Studies show they feel a considerable amount of guilt about it. They feel bad later and want to apologize.

Meda Chesney-Lind

#10. Violence among boys is so valorized and so encouraged that you have to do things different in violence prevention with boys than with girls.

Meda Chesney-Lind