Fighting for Girls

Meda Chesney-Lind is Professor of Women's Studies at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. Her many books include Beyond Bad Girls: Gender, Violence, and Hype (coauthored with Katherine Irwin); The Female Offender: Girls, Women, and Crime, Second Edition (coauthored with Lisa Pasko); and Girls, Delinquency, and Juvenile Justice, Third Edition (coauthored with Randall G. Shelden). Nikki Jones is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is the author of Between Good and Ghetto: African American Girls and Inner City Violence.

• List of TablesAcknowledgmentsIntroduction Meda Chesney-Lind and Nikki JonesPart I. Real Trends in Female Violence: Getting Tough on Girls 1. Have "Girls Gone Wild"?Mike Males2. Criminalizing Assault: Do Age and Gender Matter?Eve S. Buzawa and David Hirschel3. Jailing "Bad" Girls: Girls’ Violence and Trends in Female IncarcerationMeda Chesney-LindPart II. Girls’ Violence: Institutional Contexts and Concerns 4. The Gendering of Violence in Intimate Relationships: How Violence Makes Sex Less Safe for GirlsMelissa E. Dichter, Julie A. Cederbaum, and Anne M. Teitelman5. Policing Girlhood? Relational Aggression and Violence PreventionMeda Chesney-Lind, Merry Morash, and Katherine Irwin6. "I don’t know if you consider that as violence...": Using Attachment Theory to Understand Girls' Perspectives on ViolenceJudith A. Ryder7. Reducing Aggressive Behavior in Adolescent Girls by Attending to School ClimateSibylle Artz and Diana Nicholson8. Negotiations of the Living Space: Life in the Group Home for Girls Who Use ViolenceMarion BrownPart III. Girls’ Violence: Explanations and Implications 9. "It’s about being a survivor...": African American Girls, Gender, and the Context of Inner-City ViolenceNikki Jones10. The Importance of Context in the Production of Older Girls’ Violence: Implications for the Focus of InterventionsMerry Morash, Suyeon Park, and Jung-mi KimEpilogue: Moral Panics, Violence, and the Policing of Girls: Reasserting Patriarchal Control in the New MillenniumWalter S. DeKeseredyAbout the ContributorsIndex

"Fighting for Girls represents a much-needed antidote to the epidemic of depictions of girls as violent offenders threatening the fabric of contemporary society … in one volume, readers are presented with not only ten new investigations but also with discussions of findings from hundreds of other studies all pointing to the same conclusion: girls simply are not more violent than in past … Informed by feminist perspectives and contemporary research and theory in psychology, sociology and criminal justice, readers searching for information regarding the truth about the stereotypes of violent girls will not find a better, broader, or more in depth discussion of this issue than in Fighting for Girls." — Journal of Youth and Adolescence"…a fresh, much needed look at violence among young (adolescent) girls. Chesney-Lind and Jones have assembled quite a volume; its ten chapters cover an enormous range … Highly recommended." — CHOICE"From a broad range of perspectives and empirical studies, this book addresses a number of important questions central to the study of girls and violence." — Sara Goodkind, University of Pittsburgh