Abstract
Life histories have a long tradition in criminology, extending back to the earliest days of the field (think Clifford Shaw’s (1938) Brothers in Crime), so James Messerschmidt’s latest book is in very good company. While one might question whether interviewing a 15-year-old can be said to produce a ‘life history’, in a field like criminology where the use of large, official driven data sets and secondary data is so common, Gender, Heterosexuality, and Youth Violence is unapologetically qualitative and rich. Finally, like all of Messerschmidt’s books, there is a healthy dose of theory presented along with his analysis.
The author focuses on white, working class youth with no personal experiences of physical or sexual victimization, some of whom were in the juvenile justice system at the time of the interview; he tracks three mixed gender pairs: two who have used ‘assaultive violence’; two who have been involved in what he calls ‘sexual violence’; and two who were ‘nonviolent’ at the time of the interviews. He takes from their stories a few key points. First, as he expected, gender and sexual scripts are important in the lives of young people, and parents and peers are key enforcers of these norms. For males, the expectation that they be physically ‘tough’, able to ‘fight back’, and ideally athletic, means that boys who were of smaller stature and over-weight (like all of Messerschmidt’s male respondents) were verbally bullied relentlessly by older and more physically able boys. The role of masculinity in the production of violence is clear in these life histories as is the role of fathers in encouraging physical violence. Two of the three boys coped with their lack of status in the school’s male hierarchy with violence; one eventually took to bullying and fighting with smaller and younger neighborhood boys and one sexually abused two girls (ages six and eight) that he was babysitting.
What about the girls? Here, the policing of girls’ weight and appearance by their peers is paramount, with each of the girls that Messerschmidt interviews experiencing verbal harassment because of how they looked. One girl grows up in a home where her stepfather ‘was physically violent and verbally abusive to her mother’ (p. 73). She chooses to identify with the family aggressor, mimicking the male violence she sees at home by dressing like a boy, learning to ‘fight like a boy’, and picking fights with boys whom she hoped she could beat. The other troubled girl he profiles flees over-work at home and bullying at school because of her weight by embracing a sexualized persona. This, in turn, creates problems, since the girls she then finds herself surrounded by taunt her for her sexual inexperience. Ultimately she sexually abuses a seven-year-old boy in a playground.
What about the non-violent youths? How did they differ from the youths who used violence? Basically, though parental support (in both cases) as well as supportive friends (in the case of the girl), they both emerge largely unscathed from bouts of bullying. The boy even credits his mother’s ‘women’s studies classes’ (p. 133) for helping him see that one could walk away from fights with his pride intact. In the case of the girl, an exercise and healthy eating campaign with her mother causes weight loss, encouraging participation in sports where she beats a former bully in a swim race.
Messerschmidt’s take away message in the book is twofold. First, in his theoretical chapter, he stresses the failure of criminology, including feminist criminology, to focus on the body. He notes that when one talks of gender and sexuality the ‘binary divide is a fiction’ in that ‘one’s reflexive gendered and sexual self is located in the body which in turn acts and is acted upon within a social environment’ (p. 41). This focus on the body does call attention to the ways in which the bodies of girls and boys are policed by other youth and family members as a primary way to enforce gendered and sexed norms of masculinity and femininity. This is actually one of the book’s major contributions.
Second, the book makes much of the importance of the experience of ‘bullying’ in the lives of these youth. However, unlike his work on the body, where his work is clearly anchored in a rich theoretical and criminological literature, Messerschmidt’s examination of bullying is less so. The book’s strongest policy recommendation, in fact, is that ‘curbing bullying’ in school is vital to prevention of youth violence (p. 183).
The moral panic around bullying in schools has many concerned since there is little clarity about what ‘bullying’ actually entails. Schools (and increasingly legislatures) tend to collapse a wide variety of behaviors—some crimes (physical assault) and some not (gossip and name calling) into their definitions of bullying. Even more troubling is the development of curricula that imply a sort of parity between covert and overt direct aggression—pressuring boys not to fight with each other and girls to be ‘nice’ to each other.
Feminist scholars are also alarmed by the focus on ‘meanness’ among girls, or what Messerschmidt refers to as a ‘culture of cruelty’ (p. 170) in the bullying literature. Studies focused on this (think Wiseman’s Queen Bees and Wannabes), have received a great deal of publicity in the media, some would say precisely because they track long-standing, misogynistic beliefs about girls’ and women’s duplicity, ‘bitchiness’ and venality, while failing to take into account the patriarchal context in which these behaviors occur.
More importantly, the US Department of Education has also recently cautioned that girls’ and boys’ experiences with sexual harassment and discriminatory treatment on the basis of race, color, national origin, sex, or disability status might be re-labeled as bullying thereby denying students access to meaningful and robust civil rights protections and complaint procedures (see Stein and Mennemeier, 2011). Messerschmidt notes this overlap, but his solution is simply to call attention to it in school anti-bullying policy.
Finally, while Messerschmidt explicitly eliminated youth with victimization histories from his sample, he seems surprisingly comfortable dismissing the role of trauma in girls’ pathways into delinquency and violence. Given the virtual unanimity in the scholarly literature on this point, this is a rather puzzling conclusion, particularly given the limitations of his data set.
That said, the book is an interesting read, the stories of the youthful actors diverse and complex enough to refocus us on the role of the body, heteronormativity, and sexuality in both boys’ and girls’ development and their involvements in serious forms of delinquency.