Mixed Messages

Thirteen-year-old girls steal cars. Fourteen-year-old girls stab each other with screwdrivers. Fifteen-year-olds fight with their hands until one ends up in a coma, all because she slept with the other’s boyfriend.

If more girls are committing crimes today, even more are tempted to do so. Life for many young American females is a rough pale echo of what their mothers experienced. The pressures they feel, the traps they avoid or succumb to are in fact greatly different and more dangerous than what even their older sisters faced as adolescents. Teetering between childhood and womanhood, they confront demands--to be tough but feminine, to be cool but an individual--that leave little latitude for error. “At-risk youth” is not just a hackneyed phrase for many of these young girls. It’s a cultural understatement.

Equal-opportunity badness--the increased presence of girls in the juvenile justice system--is only one indication of how the lives of young women are changing. Pressures mount even for those who will never confront a cop or a judge. Revisions in welfare law will, for example, greatly affect their status if they are single mothers.

Many of these girls, moreover, are having children. If their own lives lack boundaries of control, how can they possibly be expected to care for a new generation?

A surprising number of criminally inclined young women have been sexually abused, experts are learning. Even more often, because they live in a society where children are highly eroticized, they know far too much about sex and far too little about its potential consequences.

They may wear baby-doll dresses. But look out. When some well-intentioned authority figure tells them to “be strong,” they take that entreaty seriously.

Taking note of the quiet, largely overlooked outbreak of law-breaking girls, it seemed appropriate to take a cultural thermometer reading: to check in with some thoughtful observers on the social health of young women.

Michele Serros

At the California Youth Authority prison in Camarillo, Michele Serros’ inmate-students had to be persuaded that poetry had anything to do with their lives. But by the end of Serros’ 10-week class, there were tears of joy as the girls watched their names typed onto the anthology of their work. Mostly, Serros says, they wrote about redemption. Serros, a 29-year-old short story and poetry writer who lives in Culver City, remembers the surreal occasion when she first addressed the prisoners.

“It was odd, because I was one of five women who were there to speak. The other women, I felt, were very patronizing, telling them to act like young ladies, because once they leave this place, they’ll be in the job market--telling them to make sure they wash, wear nice clothes, nobody likes to see a girl in ratty jeans. I was so embarrassed, because I was there in jeans with big holes.

“After I spoke, this group of eight Chicanas--really tough looking, no eyebrows, lots of tattoos--called me over. They said, don’t take this wrong, but are you gay? I realized that they thought that in order to read my works aloud, I’d have to have a lot of confidence, be very masculine and that I must be a lesbian. One girl said, ‘I write poetry, but I would never share it with anybody.’

“That made me think why there were so many young Latinas there. The only reason I could think of was that there was such a strong communications gap within the family. Things just aren’t discussed. My own father, very much machismo, is very tight-lipped. Talking is embarrassing. It brings shame. So a lot of these young girls are getting all their information right on the street. I had one girl in my workshop, she was 13. I found out she was in for killing her grandmother. I thought, wow, she can do something like that, but she could never show me her poems.

“Some girls would shove little hand-written notes at me. Same thing when they would give me their poetry, it was like last-minute, shoved into my hand, with a look that said: Don’t show nobody else.

“I remember there was an elderly Anglo woman speaking to this hard-core Chola girl--and she was just listening. That would be wonderful, if more people would just listen to these girls--not be so biased, not make assumptions. When I held up my book [a collection of short stories called ‘Chicana Falsa,’ published in 1993 by Lalo Press], it was a very big deal to see the Spanish surname on the jacket. The girls who were clicking their tongues and rolling their eyes when I was introduced as the poetry teacher, those were the ones who at the end of the 10 weeks were sending me notes saying please come back, we don’t have a lot of women like you. I think they were just happy because I was Latina, and I wasn’t a security guard.”

Lisa Krueger

Sixteen-year-old Laurel likes to be known as Lo. For her own nom de la rue, 11-year-old Amanda has chosen the name Manny. The two are sent to separate foster homes following the death of their mother; their fathers are absent, and apparently irrelevant. The two girls run from their foster homes, a cinematic acknowledgment that many girls enter the juvenile justice system as runaways. “Manny and Lo,” a new film from director Lisa Krueger, offers a madcap portrayal of the two sisters who believe they are fugitives. As it happens, Manny and Lo are so marginalized that their disappearance matters to no one.

From her home in Sacramento, Krueger talks about her movie:

“In order to find a girl to play this tough, overcautious 16-year-old who likes to beat her chest and says she was never the family type anyway--I knew I was not likely to find that girl among actresses, who are incredibly aware of their image.

“The casting director went to Washington Square Park in New York. She would find these girls who were the exact embodiment of Lo. She’d go up to them, say, ‘So how’d you like to be in a movie?’ And they’d say forget it. I think this is because for teenage girls, there is an incredible pressure to indulge and exploit issues of their image, things that they have very little control over in reality. Their own image of themselves is kind of nonexistent except in how it is reflected in others. The girls who manage against all odds to become their own image, their own definer--these girls had no desire to go preen in front of the camera.

“We had an instinct that we would find the girl we were looking for more in music than in movies. With music, you see Liz Phair, Courtney Love, Alanis Morissette. They all have a kind of bravery and self-definition that just is not about waiting around for the guys to say oh, she’s so cool. Sure enough, Aleksa Palladino, who plays Lo, had never been in acting. She’s 14, and she had started her own band called ‘Ugly.’ She had patterned her style after that of Courtney Love. She came in to read for us dressed in a baby-doll dress, with tattered lace tights and barrettes in her hair.

“When she read for us, there was nothing, no gesture that bespoke flirtation or ingratiation. It was an amazing contrast--the lace, the baby-doll dress, the barrettes, all of which said: I’m cute, I’m innocent. Then she began wailing her lungs out. It was completely about subverting the usual posture of girlhood. That posture is so much about being a receptacle: a receptacle of looks for somebody else, a receptacle of cultural expectations. In some ways the baby-doll dress was her disguise.

“What I was trying to get at with the character of Lo is that yes, she can survive, she can move from house to house--all the while believing, because she has to, that she is ‘wanted,’ that people are trying to find her. It turns out that people are not looking for her. That kind of survival spirit seems strong in many young girls today. And it seems to me it creates--well, it’s almost like when you break somebody’s arm. It does grow back, it does heal, but it grows back very strange. You can be at once in awe of their ability to grow the arm back, and also feel an incredible sadness for the ensuing deformity.”

Mary Pipher

Cultural anthropologist / psychologist Mary Pipher’s book about female adolescence, “Reviving Ophelia” (Grosset / Putnam, 1994), was considered so unmarketable that 13 publishers rejected the manuscript that later spent more than two years on national bestseller lists. Pipher’s new book, “The Shelter of Each Other: Rebuilding Our Families” (Grosset / Putnam, 1996), argues that the very culture of this country has become toxic to families. Pipher, based in Lincoln, Neb., explains:

“On the one hand, young women get all the traditional messages: Be a beautiful, passive object; be a sort of quiet, well-behaved people-pleasing person. On the other hand, they get the message that strong women aren’t that way. Particularly for younger women in their early teens, what ‘strong’ means isn’t what you and I are. It means ‘able to hurt people.’ Particularly if these girls aren’t terribly bright or subtle in their thinking, ‘strong’ becomes a very literal term.

“Some parents inadvertently send their daughters the message that we approve of that ability, the ability to be aggressive, when we tell them it’s good to fight back, it’s good to be aggressive, like a boy.

“They join gangs because they need community. If they can’t have good community, they will find bad community. I think that’s what gangs are: children’s pathetic attempt to have community. But if you look at why girls join gangs as opposed to why boys join gangs, it comes back to the way we socialize boys and girls. The very succinct way to say it is that we socialize women that relationships are everything. Men define real wealth as being powerful. So with gangs, girls are in it for love and boys are in it for power.

“Something else is that all children have been so desensitized to violence. That makes anybody of either gender more likely to be violent. The experience of being sexually abused makes girls so angry. Trust is everything for young people. Once trust is broken, things get messed up so quickly. I’m guessing that there are more and more girls who are essentially unsocialized. They have virtually no contact with adults. They have never had the experience of anybody caring if they learned right from wrong.

“Here is one prescription: They must have at least one person who cares for them when they are young. So we need to have some sort of review system when children leave a hospital that says children do not go into an environment that does not love them, period. Essentially we don’t have any kind of safety net for children in this country. I think the judgment is there, and I think frankly the resources are there. The issue is really, does this country have a commitment to children?”

Dr. Alvin Poussaint

In creating the media center for children at the Judge Baker Children’s Center in Boston, one of Dr. Alvin Poussaint’s aims was to foster the social and physical health of young people through media. The center’s first television pilot, a comedy / drama called “Willoughby’s Wonders” that’s aimed at 6- to 9-year-olds, is in production. The series uses soccer as a metaphor for managing conflict.

Poussaint, a child psychiatrist on the faculty of Harvard Medical School, has consulted for all the major television networks, as well as PBS.

“Just as one example, if you look over the past decades, young women were not even supposed to use four-letter words. Now they use every four-letter word that was ever invented. It’s on the air, it’s in the movies, it’s on the streets and it’s in homes. Then there are the kind of role models where you see women as action-adventure heroines, where they use violence and shoot ‘em up and so on. It shows they can shoot people and choke people, just like the guys.

“It’s kind of a leveling with men that means women are being the victims of the same kinds of models in movies and TV as guys are. Most of these movies are so incredibly violent and profane. If you get dosed up high enough, there’s a message there: like strike out, protect yourself. We know that young teenage girls often tend to imitate behavior styles in movie and TV, more than boys do. I don’t know exactly why. But surveys show that young girls say that TV and the movies encourage them to have sex, be sexual.

“Then you have the music--the rap music and the rock music--that is more profane than ever. So I think that crime, violence, dealing with some of the antisocial behavior has become more culturally implanted in young girls than ever before in the history of the country. The other thing that’s an element here, think of the emphasis on domestic violence and fighting back, not accepting brutalization. Again, you have another message about fighting back, being more assertive, more aggressive.

“With more and more young mothers going to jail, there are big implications for child-rearing. Traditionally we saw the woman as the stabilizing force in the home, even when the fathers went to jail. When mothers go to jail, you have a double impact: first as a dangerous and negative role model, then with separation.

“But this whole problem is systemic. You have something that is happening now with the welfare bill. You’re going to force a lot of these young women into more antisocial behavior, stealing more, into an illicit underground economy. My prediction is that these elements will continue to push forward, and that criminal behavior in young girls is going to continue to increase.”

Jennifer Grossman

Twenty-nine-year-old Jennifer Grossman borrows from Republican vice presidential nominee Jack Kemp to characterize herself as a “bleeding-heart conservative.” Grossman is a freelance Washington speech writer who formerly worked for President George Bush. Her office is in the Cato Institute, a conservative Washington think tank. She is disturbed by the roughness she sees among young girls.

“I think de Tocqueville was the first to point out that the strength of American democracy relied on the superiority of its women. Women in America have always played a very strong role in maintaining mores, and as custodians of community values and personal virtues.

“I saw the change even as I was in third grade at a public school. I was actually threatened and bullied a lot more by my female classmates. The most teasing I would get from boys was pulling my pigtails. The girls would threaten to bring in knives.

“To paraphrase Pink Floyd, we’ve become comfortably numb. Take a look at [former Secretary of Education] Bill Bennett’s cultural indicators: What the PTA saw as the chief problems in the ‘50s--chewing gum, dress code infractions, running in the halls--now it’s bringing guns to school, violence against teachers, violence against other student, drugs.

“I think this problem of eroticizing our children is one of the chief causes of the violence and aggression and vulgarization among young girls. The whole approach to sexuality among our children has been one of management.

“I remember hearing [about] one school, where they were teaching kids how to use condoms, and they decided the policy would be to learn to do this on a banana. A lot of the teachers said the little girls don’t like this. They pull back. But the conclusion was, well, they must be encouraged very firmly to do this. The focus was that girls must be armed, equipped with these weapons against pregnancy. Actually what you need to do is strengthen that reticence, strengthen that feminine virtue--and not just make girls like boys.

“In formulating policy, you should remove those bureaucratic and economic incentives that encourage self-destructive behavior, such as subsidizing illegitimacy, or marriage penalties--not just in taxation but in the welfare system. Another area would be to enact those reforms that strengthen family cohesiveness and parental authority, such as school choice. This would enable parents to feel more involved in their children’s education.

“Third, we need to recapture as a society that sense of awe that comes from knowing that each life is a precious gift from God. We need to as a society end our hostility to religion, and also just really from a very practical, unromantic point of view, we need to recognize that programs which have spiritual orientation can really make a difference in encouraging restraint and giving people a sense of dignity. Otherwise it becomes easy to say, we’ll just build more gated communities, we’ll just keep you people over there.”

Sapphire

To her astonishment, poet and novelist Sapphire sometimes has to explain that her novel “Push” (Knopf, 1996) is no exaggeration. Sapphire’s protagonist, 16-year-old Precious, is based on the very real girls Sapphire encountered teaching and living in Harlem for a dozen years. Once, her school organized a “Save the Black Male” day. Sapphire wondered, what about the black female?

“Basically what I was told was that the women weren’t hurting anybody but themselves. And if they wanted to have a baby by themselves, so what? The black boys were going to hurt each other, or other people. They will hurt the rest of society, whereas a girl’s activities marginalize herself, which in some sad way fits in with what the culture expects.

“In talking to young people, I’m learning how much of this was not consensual sex. The media gives this image of a hot little thing. More often, it seems that young girls are the victims of people constantly, from puberty on, pressuring them to have sex, often with men who are considerably older.

“The sexism of African American culture--there was a way that the boys were being put ahead of the girls. It’s just as important that Johnny doesn’t pick up a gun at 14 that Johnetta doesn’t get pregnant at 14. If that’s happening, then the education needs to start at 7 and 8. Just as you see your mother getting up and going to work in some parts of the culture--for you, early sexual activity is the norm if it is not counteracted.

“All kids want freedom. But they think freedom is an apartment and a separate welfare check from your mother.”