Apologies in advance for these inchoate thoughts… I am working on a workshop and also on a paper about reconceptualizing relationship violence in the lives of young women of color. I am playing around with ideas and using the blog as a way to work through what I want to say. These ideas are just coming into focus for me. If you have anything to contribute, I would as always welcome your thoughts..

In November 2003, I ran a seven week girls’ group at a Chicago alternative middle school that I will call Dewey. There were nine young women in my group. They were between 12 to 16 years old, all of them were girls of color and each was at Dewey (not the actual name of the school) because she had been kicked out of her neighborhood school. In a school of over 100 students, only about ten were young women. The overwhelming majority of these girls had been kicked out of their home school for fighting. In an age of zero tolerance school discipline policies, administrators are quick to expel young people of color who “use violence” on school premises.

This was the first time that I had worked with a group of girls who had been expressly labeled as “violent.” My experience prior to this had been to facilitate groups with girls who were seen to be in some way at-risk either because of their life circumstance, substance use, or exposure to violence. Dewey was a challenging experience for me for many reasons. I remember feeling so tired and depressed at the end of this group. I wrote a lot in my journal during those weeks. Here is one entry from December 4th 2003:

“So I came home on Thursday night exhausted. I don’t understand how these girls can find the strength to even come to school each day. Today was a tough day in group. I could tell that the girls were feeling restless. Brittany was getting upset over the smallest things. She couldn’t seem to calm down. Other girls looked extremely tired. I interrupted today’s activity and asked if anyone felt the need to check in about what was happening in their lives. Xandria confided that she had been kicked out of the house by her step-father. She told the group: ‘It’s ok though, this is the third time it’s happened.” I said, ‘Well it still must hurt.’ Right away she said: ‘it doesn’t hurt me none.’ But her face betrayed her tough words. That 13 year old girl sat there trying to be so tough when it was obvious how much she was hurting. I wanted to take her home with me. Sarah, my co-facilitator, asked where she was living now. She told us that she was at her 23 year old brother’s place. Other girls shared their own trials. One girl told us that she missed a friend of hers because he had dropped out of school last week. She thought that she wouldn’t see him again. Another girl told us about the fact that Thanksgiving with her family had been particularly rife with conflict. I looked at Sarah and we both felt helpless. We thanked everyone for sharing. I told them how brave and courageous I thought they each were for sharing their feelings with the group. We moved on to decorating our picture frames. The discussion about their problems was over. It felt so incomplete. We were helpless to intervene.”

Another entry in my diary on December 19, 2003 read:

“I ended my seven weeks at [Dewey] middle school yesterday. Wow! What an interesting and challenging group of girls. The girls in the group are dealing with so much. Xandria and her conflicts with her step-father – being kicked out of her house regularly. Sky and her “boyfriend” and her alcoholic mother who is apparently abusive towards her. Erica who comes to school high on dope almost every day. Melanie and her depression, lack of confidence, and whose father is a drug dealer. The list just goes on and on. It feels as though their lives are just so filled with crises and difficulties. Natasha who is 16 and still in the 8th grade. Natasha who had a pregnancy scare last week. Natasha who has both parents in jail and lives with an elderly grandparent. No wonder they are resorting to violence and getting kicked out of school. They feel trapped and they need to be free. Their entire lives are permeated by relentless oppression which is in and of itself violence.”

At the time, I was working at a local domestic violence organization where I managed a teen dating violence prevention program. In 2003, the Relationship Education: A Choice for Hope (R.E.A.C.H.) program served over 5,000 young people across Chicago.

I developed the girls’ groups as an additional forum within which to address violence in their lives. The girls at Dewey school were both survivors and perpetrators of relationship violence. Prior to this experience, I had mainly tailored our programming to focus on young women as victims, survivors, and witnesses of violence. This orientation was warranted because women and girls experience rampant violence on the streets, in their schools, and at home. The statistics are staggering. Research suggests that young women ages 16 – 24 are at the greatest risk for injury and death at the hands of intimate partners compared to all other age groups (Bureau of Justice Statistics, 2000). More than half of all rapes of women occur before age 18 (Tjaden and Thoennes, 2000). Eighty-nine percent of teens infected with HIV through heterosexual activity were female in one major study, and sexual contact with adult males was a key risk factor (CDC, 2004). In a Chicago-based study of prostituted women, 62% entered prostitution before their eighteenth birthdays (Raphael and Shapiro, 2002). The rate at which U.S. courts are sentencing girls under 18 to detention is growing much more quickly than the rate for boys, and the courts often incarcerate girls for behavior for which they do not incarcerate their male peers (Miazad, 2002).

Violence is so widespread in young women’s lives that they find themselves adjusting, accepting, and adapting to it. It permeates all aspects of our culture. The brutal truth is that young women in the U.S. grow up to live in, reflect, and sometimes reproduce this increasingly violent culture just as we all do, in some fashion. Instead of being “passive victims” the girls at Dewey were beginning to fight back and resist the onslaught of violence perpetrated against them. As Dr. Laurie Schaffner (2007) has written “violence against women animates women’s violence (p.1230).” Given this reality, we have to shift our approach to focus on comprehensive interventions for addressing the various forms of violence confronting young women on a daily basis.

To be continued…