8 Ball Chicks: A Year in The Violent World of Girl Gangsters by Gini Sikes, Sikes

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Synopsis

Dismissed by the police as mere adjuncts to or gofers for male gangs, girl gang members are in fact often as emotionally closed off and dangerous as their male counterparts. Carrying razor blades in their mouths and guns in their jackets for defense, they initiate drive-by shootings, carry out car jackings, stomp outsiders who stumble onto or dare to enter the neighborhood, viciously retaliate against other gangs and ferociously guard their home turf.

But Sikes also captures the differences that distinguish girl gangs-abortion, teen pregnancy and teen motherhood, endless beatings and the humiliation of being forced to have sex with a lineup of male gangbangers during initiation, haphazardly raising kids in a household of drugs and guns with a part-time boyfriend off gangbanging himself. Veteran journalist Gini Sikes spends a year in the ghettos following the lives of several key gang members in South Central Los Angeles, San Antonio, and Milwaukee. In 8 Ball Chicks, we discover the fear and desperate desire for respect and status that drive girls into gangs in the first place--and the dreams and ambitions that occasionally help them to escape the catch-22 of their existence.

Nell Bernstein

The book jacket is scary, garish purple. A bloated, ratty-haired girl squints evilly and points her gun, Uncle Sam-style, right at you. Fortunately, 8 Ball Chicks, journalist Gini Sikes' look at female gang members in three U.S. cities, doesn't deliver on its cover's tabloid promise. Sikes' subjects are sometimes frightening, but she isn't trying to scare us. Her girl gangsters are more victims than perps, trapped by their own violence, desperately fighting against disappearing entirely.

Subtitled "A Year in the Violent World of Girl Gangsters," 8 Ball Chicks falls within the booming genre of the inner-city travelogue: rental-car journeys into and out of American ghettos. The format has some intrinsic problems - do we really believe that poor Americans inhabit an entirely separate "world"? - but, at its best, lets us hear voices excluded from most mainstream accounts of urban life. And with violent crime rates multiplying for adolescent females even as they fall for males, Sikes has picked an important topic at the right moment.

Sikes' analysis is sparse and not particularly illuminating ("Without an effective national policy for youth, kids fell through the cracks in droves"), but she's got a good ear and the sense to step back and let her subjects seize the microphone most of the time. Guided by gang girls in Los Angeles, San Antonio and Milwaukee, she visits neighborhoods in which traditional female routes to power - sexuality, femininity, maternity - have been so devalued that it's better to be like the guys than liked by them. So the young women don baggy clothing, stuff weapons down their pants and wreak havoc on a society that has, in many cases, allowed them to be abused physically and sexually since they were children. If they're fearless, it's only because death is preferable to loneliness, physical pain more bearable than unvented rage.

In each new environment, Sikes plays up her own naiveté - a tactic that makes her look sincere, but also casts doubt on her qualifications as an interpreter of inner-city life. She fears for her handbag, mistakes a .25 automatic for a cigarette lighter and, most disturbingly, professes herself surprised that the gang girls imagine better futures for themselves. At the same time, she steers clear of melodrama and gratuitous suspense, making it plain that "the life" is also ordinary life, as boring and repetitive as it is violent and chaotic. If her story lacks the passion of first-person accounts of gang life like Monster Cody's Monster, or the depth of long-term works of reportage like Alex Kotlowitz's There Are No Children Here, it certainly offers a more nuanced look at the lives of female gang members than filmmaker Allison Anders' sentimental Mi Vida Loca. -- Salon

Biography

Gini Sikes, a former senior writer at Mademoiselle, was a producer for PBS's national weekly series on urban teenagers, "In the Mix." She has written about youth culture and crime for The Washington Post, Glamour, Vibe, Mirabella, and MTV.  She lives in Brooklyn, New York.