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The Violence Of Gangs And Gangs

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Gangs have become one of the nation’s fastest growing problems within recent history. According to the Federal Bureau of Investigation about 33,000 violent street gangs, motorcycle gangs, and prison gangs with about 2.4 million members are criminally active in the U.S. today. They use violence to control neighborhoods and boost their illegal moneymaking activities, which include but are not limited to: robbery, drug and gun trafficking, fraud, extortion, and prostitute rings. With as much research that has been conducted on gangs the research fails to study females and their participation in gangs. Female gangs have long been overlooked in the gang literature. Although there are similarities between young women and men in gangs, some have claimed that the process of gang membership is different for young women. This paper will discuss the history of women in gangs, why they join gangs, their reasons for leaving a gang, and how they manage to get out.
Women have participated in gangs since the earliest accounts from New York in the early
1800s, their participation is not a new phenomenon. We didn’t hear much about female gangs because females were seen to be inferior towards males. Women were considered to be auxiliaries, affiliates, or instruments that primarily were sex objects. Evidence has shown that young women represent a growing percentage of gang members. According to Campbell (1991), some women were thought to participate in gangs as tomboys who refused to take the

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