Abstract
Marcella, a 15-year-old Puerto Rican girl, adjudicated and reprimanded to a New York residential youth facility as a violent offender, recalled committing a series of aggressive offenses from burning the hair of a homeless man while on a train to stabbing a boy in the neighborhood. For many, such actions are unconscionable. They defy social norms and expectations for how children should behave, and more specifically, girls. Inversely, Marcella’s actions further stereotypical ideas of poor, youth of color—the public’s perceptions of inherent criminality, fear, and the need for severe punishment—irrespective of the social contexts in which they occurred. No one accounted for Marcella’s disrupted childhood—the fact that she dropped out of school in the sixth grade and has spent much of her young life as the primary caretaker for an alcoholic, suicidal mother, who is paralyzed and wheelchair bound due to random gunfire. However, Girls and Violence: Tracing the Roots of Criminal Behavior offers insight into the often ignored experiences of adolescents like Marcella, whose lives have not only been marred by extreme violence, but defer to it in absence of state intervention.
In eight all-inclusive chapters, Ryder relies heavily on the work of psychologists John Bowlby (1969) and Mary Ainsworth, Silvia Bell, and Donelda Stayton (1971), as well as, feminist criminology to not only construct an intelligible pathway for how girls resort to extreme violence but elicit healthy alternatives and intervention for them as they are often vulnerable to “polyvictimization”—overlapping, varying forms of violence both in their homes and communities—and more susceptible to posttraumatic stress as a result (pp. 63–64).
Using the personal narratives of institutionalized girls to define and explain violence, preceding and subsequent to their offenses, Girls and Violence aims at increasing public awareness and activism. Furthermore, Ryder seeks to advance institutional support (i.e., policies and programs) and operative collaborative efforts between social service agencies, as well as educational and juvenile justice systems for disadvantaged families, and more directly, women and girls as they are often primary caretakers.
Girls and Violence calls attention to three critical junctures during adolescence—the first being girls’ experiences with overlapping violence, loss, or lack of support in early childhood relationships. Hence, Ryder emphatically points to these periods of neglect and abandonment—often under extremely violent circumstances—as the root for ensuing trauma and inevitably, the development of defunct emotional attachments. Second are the “traumagenic effects” (i.e., anger, shame, anxiety, and numbing); (p. 25) that arise as a result of the first. In this space, Girls and Violence yields attention to running away, substance abuse, and self-harm—actions indicative of an uncultivated ability to revert to healthy, productive, “problem-focused coping” strategies (p. 114). Third are the explicative manifestations of the previous two phases. It is the point where defected emotional attachments and maladjusted coping skills became intrinsically linked, giving way to the most impulsively defensive, egregious of behaviors: extreme violence.
As an in-depth examination of traumatic lifecycles, Girls and Violence is an excellent resource for readers looking to better understand the impact of violence on girls’ lives—as victims and victimizers—from a feminist perspective. It is especially appealing to scholars and activists, empathetic to the intersection of race, class, gender, sexuality, and antiviolent efforts. While the book’s weakness lies in its overreliance on a broad causative model for explaining narrow, atypical incidents—“extreme” cases of girls’ violence—it is offset by its thorough assessment of the all-too-often underestimated and unparalleled dimensions of vulnerability and victimization as faced by disadvantaged girls of color.