The Throwaways

She is a California golden girl, swimsuit-model slender and supremely self-assured. Her eyes are the icy blue of a mountain lake on a cool, cloudless day. Her hair is tawny, pulled back with a scrunchie in the haphazard high fashion of adolescence. The pearly pink polish on her nails is a shade a younger girl might have chosen, probably the only choice there at the San Francisco juvenile detention center. Penny is 16 and doing time for murder, 25 years to life.

The victim was 15, another runaway, a girl from Klamath Falls, Ore. Police say Penny was asleep when they came to arrest her in the burned-out San Francisco church she and the victim shared with other vagrants. On the wall above her was a splash of graffiti: “There’s nothing like senseless violence to snap you out of a depression.” Penny acted, a police officer recalled, “like there was absolutely nothing wrong.”

Penny insists the teenager wanted to die. She says that by helping to strangle the girl, she participated in an act of assisted suicide. Her conviction is on appeal, leaving Penny to shake her head mutely when asked about what happened. But she swiftly becomes animated when describing incarceration. She sheds her prison-issue plastic sandals and paces, catlike, in heavy sweat socks emblazoned: DO NOT REMOVE, SAN FRANCISCO YOUTH GUIDANCE CENTER.

Penny is a witness in the forthcoming trial of an adult male who is charged in the killing, and so is barred from discussing details of the crime. Recounting what has gone on in her head since the 15-year-old was found with a cord around her neck, Penny’s hands fly out in exuberant gestures of emphasis. When she talks about the future, her gaze freezes solid.

“For the first few months in here I was ready to hang myself. I made a rope out of the rug in my room. I braided it. I kept it hidden. I kept it ready. I thought about using it. I thought about it all the time.”

Penny’s eyes take in the mud-toned walls, the endless halls, the iron bars. “I got rid of the rope,” she says. “But I still think about it.”

Killers, like Penny, are the exceptions. Most of the growing number of girls who find their way into a juvenile justice system that is ill-equipped to deal with them are busted for less flamboyant offenses.

Assault and/or battery is increasingly popular among young girls; so is shoplifting, petty theft or robbery; also, myriad infractions involving automobiles, stolen or otherwise. If in the past many have been mules for their drug-dealing boyfriends, these days more girls are dealing drugs themselves--figuring, apparently, that if they’re going to run the risk, they might as well reap the profit.

Nationally, most girls in the 10- to 18-year-old range are still brought in on so-called status offenses, transgressions peculiar to their age group--and, many experts argue, to their gender as well. Running away from home is a status offense, as are incorrigibility and some forms of sexual licentiousness.

“In the last five years, there’s a definite change, yes,” said Barry Nidorf, chief probation officer for Los Angeles County. “It’s the seriousness” of offenses that brings girls into the system, “not just the numbers” that is noteworthy, Nidorf remarked.

Girls may carry handguns--a “little .22-caliber” weapon fits nicely in a bra, one California high school student reports--but use them less frequently than boys. But getting physical is definitely no boys-only domain. Some middle and high school girls practice an art called “banking,” in which three, four, even five of them form a wall and take down whichever lone target they select. Increasingly, girls use their fists to fight with each other. They fight with boys. They fight with strangers.

This troubling “equalization” of delinquent behavior has profound implications, said Dr. Deborah Prothrow-Stith, who specializes in youth violence at the Harvard School of Public Health. “Our epidemic of youth violence in America, which is about a decade old, has now reached girls,” she said, predicting that if present trends continue, girls may one day catch up with boys in homicide rates.

Bands of marauding girls do not roam the streets, nor does the sight of tough-looking teenage girls inspire the kind of discomfort that boys with a certain swagger inevitably invite. Girl gangs work the streets in some cities but tend to aim their aggression at their own rivals. But for girls between 10 and 18, statistics from the National Center for Juvenile Justice for 1993 (the most recent year for which data were available) show a 23% increase over four years in the number of female juveniles arrested. This figure contrasts with an 11% increase in the arrests of male juveniles over the same period.

At the Orange County probation department, research director Gwen Kurtz said the involvement of juvenile females has been creeping steadily upward as well. In the first nine months of 1994, 16% of referrals to the county’s juvenile justice system were female. In the same period in 1995, the figure was 17%. Among juveniles whose cases went on to court, in the first nine months of 1994, 11% were girls--against 13% in the first nine months of 1995. In both cases the increase is small--but significant, Kurtz said, because “there is a growing group of girls involved in some very serious stuff. That’s what’s changing.”

Comparable figures were unavailable from Los Angeles County, spokesman Craig Levy explained, because budget cutbacks a decade ago eliminated positions that were considered luxuries, including statisticians. But Levy said the 7,106 juvenile females who had contact with at least two county justice programs in 1993 represented a broad spectrum of offenses--as well as communities. “You see a lot of the same things in South-Central that you see in the Valley,” Levy said.

Yet what is not changing--not much, anyway--is a widespread failure to acknowledge or accommodate the growing presence of young girls who break the law. Girls in the juvenile justice system “have always been an afterthought, if they’ve been a thought at all,” said Ilene Bergsmann, the assistant superintendent of the Cook County Juvenile Detention Center in Illinois. Institutions have never been prepared to deal with these girls, Bergsmann said, “because everything has been designed for boys, and girls have been expected to fit into the mold.”

Male and female juvenile offenders alike are subject to paternalistic attitudes, said Bergsmann--that, or a compensatory notion that impartiality should translate to excessive harshness. But girls, when they are considered at all, labor under a separate set of conflicting stereotypes. Girls who commit crimes are seen either as “sweet little things gone awry or as predators,” Bergsmann said. Either image is detrimental to serious attempts at intervention.

“I was at a management information systems meeting and everybody was talking about race,” Bergsmann recalled. “I brought up gender, and they all started shaking their heads, like, ‘Oh? you think that’s important?’ ”

That sense of dismissal turns girls into invisible delinquents. They’re out there, on the streets, running into trouble with the law. They’re in the system--albeit a system that often wonders what to do with them. But in terms of public awareness, or concern, they’re not even on the scope. As Bergsmann put it, “These really are the throwaway girls.”

Girls are consistently overlooked in discussions of youth crime, and even some serious academic studies have an unapologetic and exclusive focus on young male offenders. As is the case at the juvenile jail Bergsmann oversees, girls are usually incarcerated in makeshiftfacilities carved out of boys’ institutions. A double standard in the very understanding of youth crime is only exacerbated by a cultural discomfort with the subject of girls and delinquency.

“We’re still living in a society where we think of boys gone astray as dangerous and girls gone astray as blameworthy,” said Heather Johnston Nicholson, director of the national resource center for Girls Inc. (formerly the Girls Clubs of America) in Indianapolis. “The level of judgment is very different.”

With juveniles as with adults, “we either ignore women’s violence entirely or we demonize it,” said Meda Chesney-Lind, director of women’s studies at the University of Hawaii and author of “Girls, Delinquency and Juvenile Justice” (Brooks/Cole, 1992). Summoning up the American folk heroine who may or may not have given her mother 40 whacks a century ago, Chesney-Lind added, “I call it the Lizzie Borden syndrome.”

Drawn Into the Circle of Violence

Today the weapon of choice for many young women is the razor blade, properly carried during school hours under one’s tongue. At the Southern Oaks Girls School, a high-security girls’ prison in Union Grove, Wis., 15-year-old Renee reveals a more creative alternative. Renee, a minister’s daughter, says she used to store razor blades in the gravity-defying pigtails she combs straight up, like rockets headed to the moon.

“This girl made fun of my hair. She kept touching it,” says Renee, who, like all the young women in this story, chose the name by which she wanted to be identified. “So I put razor blades in my pigtails. She don’t make fun of me no more.”

Girls also favor knives. “Cut” is the term they use to describe what happens with a knife, as in, “You cut him?”

Brittany, a strapping 14-year-old from a grim neighborhood in Baltimore, packed a long, fearsome blade into her backpack when a boy at her middle school began bothering her. Brittany says he was stalking her. No point in telling school authorities, Brittany decided. They wouldn’t do anything anyway. When the boy crossed Brittany’s mental Maginot line, she cut him.

“One day, he was in the hallway as I was going to music, and he pushed me. I just surely jumped right in,” Brittany explains. “My friends were holding me back. They were like, ‘You should have ignored it.’ I did ignore it, long enough. I had my protection in case he got a little crazy. We just got crazy together.”

Brittany was convicted of assault with a deadly weapon, a relief since it might have been attempted murder. She got a year’s probation, and to her amazement, actually enjoys the after-school program her probation officer sent her to.

So Brittany, had you used that knife before?

Brittany snorts. What a stupid question.

“Course I had.”

Oh yeah? When’d you use it?

“In the kitchen. To take the skin off the potatoes.”

In Boston’s Dorchester district, 14-year-old Makesha’s skill with a knife is almost as impressive as her rap sheet. She remembers well how she felt the first time she cut someone.

“I felt fitted in,” Makesha says.

The theme of belonging through bad behavior threads through a culture that struggles on the one hand to preserve an image of girls as ruffly little creatures, clad of course in pink, who may occasionally be duplicitous and conniving but who remain for the most part sweet and preferably passive. On the other hand, the same culture tunes into a show like “Melrose Place,” where girls blow up buildings or plot to kill each other. In a popular Aerosmith video, fresh-faced Alicia Silverstone cons a store owner into letting her steal whatever she wants, and deposits an uncooperative boyfriend in the middle of the desert. Juliette Lewis didn’t exactly go along only for the ride in “Natural Born Killers,” and the gang girls in “Mi Vida Loca” frightened fully grown men.

But none of these fictional antiheroines can compete with real life. One night not long ago, at a small residential detention center in a defunct Massachusetts women’s hospital, half a dozen girls are conducting an informal seminar on drive-by shooting.

“Wear black,” 17-year-old Marie says. “Makes you harder to see.”

“Aim low,” counsels 15-year-old Annette.

Sandra, a 16-year-old, has her left arm in bandages, the result of stab wounds.

But while they are coolly comparing guns, two other girls sit huddled under a single pastel afghan. They sit so close, they might be Siamese twins. Annette, the 15-year-old who knew where to aim, is sucking her thumb. All the girls are in pajamas, scrubbed clean after their evening baths. For one weird moment it might be a slumber party.

“Terrible criminals,” says Carol Lee Pepi, director of the program that administers their detention. Her voice oozes irony, then softens. “They’re babies, these kids. They’ve been play-acting adulthood for so long.”

Working in New York as director of Harlem’s Rheedlen Centers for Children and Families, community specialist Geoffrey Canada has observed “growing involvement among young ladies 16, 17, 18 years old--and sometimes much younger.” Many of these girls seem pulled into criminal behavior as a “fringe activity for the guys,” Canada said. “Increasingly, they are being drawn into the circle.”

Part of what concerns Canada, who explored youth violence in his book “Fist, Stick, Knife, Gun” (Beacon Press, 1995), is that delinquent behavior has become “more acceptable” among girls. At the same time, little effort is made to divert or dissuade them.

“I’m worried,” Canada said. “We as community service providers are losing these girls. No one has gone out and tried to connect with them. The kind of interventions that we have for boys don’t exist for girls. There’s no midnight basketball for girls.”

Special Circumstances for Some Girls

Young female offenders come equipped with one particular gender-specific accouterment that makes many juvenile justice officials sweat bullets. In a country where a teenage girl becomes pregnant every 90 seconds, a girl in the system is as likely as not to show up pregnant, or to confront a judge with a baby she will leave behind if the judge sends her away. Prenatal medical care means that a pregnant girl costs more to incarcerate, and complicated pregnancies are lawsuits waiting to happen. A baby born to an imprisoned mother must be placed with a relative or housed in foster care.

“I’m frequently confronted with institutions that say, ‘If she’s pregnant, we won’t take her,’ ” said David Mitchell, chief judge of the Baltimore City Juvenile Court. As a consequence, he said, “I often have to make community treatment decisions that I would not make for a boy. That can lead to reverse--or if you will, softer--treatment for girls.”

In turn, girls in the juvenile justice system have learned that pregnancy can be an advantage. “You know, a lot of girls fake that they’re pregnant so they can get out,” says Elena, a 15-year-old who lives south of Mission in San Francisco and has had frequent run-ins with the law. “Or if they keep you in, you get more food.”

But well before they considered having kids of their own, most of these girls have had the darkest qualities of adulthood foisted upon them. Intake surveys in detention centers around the country show that between 50% and 70% of girls in custody have experienced some form of physical or sexual abuse. Many place the figure higher still.

“We have 85% sexually and/or physically abused, with the high end sexual,” said Marion Daniel, director of Baltimore’s FIT (for Female Intervention Team) program. After 22 years in the field, Daniel said she is uncertain whether that figure has grown or merely reflects improved documentation. Boys who enter the juvenile justice system are less likely to be asked about sexual abuse, though some experts believe a history of sexual abuse to be rampant among them as well.

“We just didn’t talk about it in the past. We didn’t know how to address the problem,” Daniel said, noting that sex education programs for juvenile offenders increasingly include segments aimed at victims of abuse. “We thought girls were running away because they were wild. No one stopped to ask, ‘Why are you running away, honey?’ ”

Adolescence is difficult enough, but throw sexual abuse into the raging hormonal equation and a chemical explosion is easy to understand. At the Wisconsin penitentiary, 17-year-old Sarah, for example, says she was 12 when her recurring nightmare began. Every night, Sarah would wake up, sometimes screaming, with the image of her favorite uncle on top of her. Troubled, Sarah’s mother confronted the uncle, who confirmed that he had raped the child repeatedly from the time she was 2 until she was 4 years old.

Because the statute of limitations had elapsed, the uncle was not prosecuted. Sarah began to drink, heavily. She started using marijuana and cocaine. She became an accomplished truant: “I never went to school, never.” In their hometown in northern Wisconsin, Sarah and a friend stole a car, cracked it up and destroyed the transmission. To raise money for drugs, she pawned her grandmother’s wedding ring. Then, when another girl called her an unpleasant name, Sarah cracked her skull open with her bare hands. Sarah was 16, the same age as her victim.

Sarah says her sexual abuse does not excuse her behavior, but it does provide an explanation. “Sometimes I think you need to go way, way back to know what caused your problem,” she says. “I was mad. I was so mad. But I never admitted it. I never let it out. I acted it out instead.”

The extent of physical and sexual abuse among girl delinquents stuns even those who study this field. “This is astonishing, when you think about it,” said Chesney-Lind, at the University of Hawaii. But she cautioned that once again, the long-standing stereotype would not fit this population.

“Don’t expect the plundered waif, because that is not how she has survived,” Chesney-Lind said. “The defiance, the excessive peer orientation--that’s one way she can survive.”

At a busy Baltimore street corner, one such survivor, Tanya, recently waited for a bus with her little sister Teresa. Tanya just turned 17. But rail-thin, in jeans, wearing no makeup and with her hair combed in a Mom-approved pageboy, she easily looks three years younger. By contrast, 15-year-old Teresa is sturdy, with a powerful body that could handily bench-press a Harley-Davidson.

Teresa has spent hours braiding her hair into elaborate spirals that snake into a cone-shaped crown. Tanya is shy, prone to an embarrassed giggle before she speaks. Teresa says what’s on her mind, loud and clear. Anyone seeing them together would guess her to be Tanya’s senior.

Teresa finds it embarrassing that her older sister agreed to go for a ride with Teresa’s boyfriend at 2 o’clock one morning. Teresa said no way when her boyfriend called up from the street. It was late and she wanted to get some sleep. Besides, her boyfriend was only 13, and what was he doing with that car, anyway? Tanya went out. She says she wanted to get some ice cream. She also says she didn’t notice that Teresa’s boyfriend was: a) driving; b) driving a car that didn’t belong to him; c) using a screwdriver to power the ignition, not a key.

The girls’ mother, Rochelle, says she was mortified when the police called at 4 in the morning to say Tanya was in custody. “You think of juvenile delinquency as a boys’ problem,” says Rochelle, a real estate broker who takes college courses at night.

But then Rochelle amplifies her family’s story. “You see, part of Tanya’s problem--Tanya was molested at the age of 14 by a close family member,” Rochelle says. Rochelle considered killing the abuser. She thought about it night after night, plotting just how she would take his life and what she would tell him as she did. But Rochelle is a single mother; she knew that if she killed her daughter’s molester, she would go to jail and her girls would have no one. They sought family counseling: “We went through hell, let’s put it that way.”

Tanya began skipping school and acting out with minor misdeeds such as trespassing. Her grades plummeted. It was a familiar turn of events to Rochelle, who says she herself was sexually abused. “I’m still being chased by my demons.”

To give her sister moral support, Teresa now accompanies Tanya to weekly meetings of the girls-only FIT program at Baltimore’s juvenile justice center. Mother and daughters agree that Tanya’s attitude has changed. She goes to a new school and no longer cuts class. Her grades have skyrocketed and she is talking about college, says she wants to be a pediatrician.

But deep down Tanya knows that the rules of being a girl today have changed from when her mother was young. “If they hit me,” Tanya says in a near-whisper, “I’m going to fight back.”

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Rise in Female Juvenile Crime

Stable until the late 1980s, arrests of juvenile girls have jumped.