Gender-Specific Conflicts among Urban African-American Youth: The Roles of Situational Context and Issues of Contention

ABSTRACT

The literatures on violence among young men and young women have highlighted the importance of situational context. However, few studies have compared disputes that do not result in violence with those that do, and even fewer have been positioned to investigate the role situational context may play across gender in accounting for these outcomes. Drawing on recent scholarship on gender and violence, this research explores the situational contexts of youth conflicts among African-American adolescent boys and girls. Using a large sample of narrative accounts of 153 violent and nonviolent conflicts, we examine how youth describe the issues of contention in their conflicts, how these relate to the situational contexts in which conflicts emerge, and similarities and differences in the antecedents, contexts, and extent of male and female violence.

Notes

¹ The broader research project includes 75 youths and investigates violence against young women and youths’ interactions with the police (Miller 2008; Brunson and Miller 2006). Three youths from the original sample (one male and two females) were excluded here because only surveys, but not in-depth interviews, were available.

² Youths were also asked about conflicts between girls and boys; however, this is beyond the scope of our article and has previously been addressed (see Miller 2008).

³ Specifically, we drew from four datasets (girls’ accounts of girls’ conflicts, boys’ accounts of boys’ conflicts, girls’ accounts of boys’ conflicts, and boys’ accounts of girls’ conflicts) that, combined, included 337 pages of interview narratives, including general descriptions of within-gender conflicts and detailed accounts of specific conflict incidents. On the whole, girls’ interviews resulted in more descriptions of conflict incidents than did boys’. Given that boys in particular viewed girls’ conflicts as trivial (see Cobbina, Like-Haislip, and Miller 2010), they rarely took the time to describe such incidents in detail to the interviewers. In addition, our conversations with girls were generally lengthier, and provided more rich detail about the contexts of conflicts. Where present, we discuss variations across girls’ and boys’ accounts in the findings section.

⁴ There were a handful of incidents in each dataset that one author coded as a conflict incident and the other did not. When this happened, all three authors went back to the narrative passages related to the incident to independently assess it. We then held conference calls to review, discuss, and reach consensus on each discrepancy. Differential classification of incidents occurred for several reasons. First, some of the respondents—particularly males—occasionally spoke in more general terms; thus, we had to make a judgment call as to whether they were speaking about specific incidents rather than the typicality of incidents. To do so, we closely scrutinized language use in the narrative to determine its specificity. Second, some incident descriptions were less rich in detail than others. To determine whether to count an incident, there had to be sufficient information about situational characteristics of events (i.e., the issue of contention, temporal features, location, the role of third parties, outcome, and use of weapons). Third, several youths described ongoing disputes between two individuals that involved multiple conflict incidents across a relatively short timeframe (hours or days), and it was sometimes challenging to parse out the individual incidents from the narrative account. Again, we made a final determination about whether and how to classify these incidents through a close reading of each narrative, first independently and then together in conference. Ultimately, we chose to count each individual incident as a single conflict, but made note of its temporal relationship within an ongoing dispute between the two parties. In all, fourteen incidents initially identified by one of the authors were excluded from the analysis, including ten among boys and four among girls.

⁵ Five incident descriptions did not provide information about the issue of contention. Nonetheless, because they included detailed information on the situational contexts of the event, they are included in our initial tabular patterns, reported in Tables 1–3.

⁶ Separate logistic regression models were analyzed for each of the situational antecedents to determine the likelihood of a physical fight versus an argument based on these characteristics.

⁷ That is, those incidents of female-on-female conflict described by girls, and incidents of male-on-male conflict described by boys.

⁸ Just two gang-related conflict incidents in community contexts were not described as violent; both involved non-gang young men who were confronted and accused of being gang members.

⁹ Of the fifteen male conflicts that involved the brandishing or use of a weapon, ten involved guns, of which seven were gang-related. Four of the six shootings reported were gang-related, one was crime retaliation, and the last was in response to a dispute that arose over a dice game.

¹⁰ The one gang-related incident involving young women likewise followed this pattern: Two girls “jumped” Katie’s cousin at school because they thought she was a member of a rival gang. Two subsequent conflicts occurred, each involving larger numbers of disputants than the last, as Katie and four friends beat up the two girls who assaulted her cousin later that day at school, and then three more of the two girls’ friends showed up after school, and a five-on-five fight commenced in the neighborhood adjoining Katie’s school.

¹¹ In fact, nearly two thirds of the boys we spoke with said they had cheated on a girlfriend, and this often caused conflict in their romantic relationships as well (Miller and White 2003).

¹² The only reported case in the community involved a gun; the second was a cafeteria tray at school that one young man used to hit the other one with. We report here on 18 rather than 19 cases; in one case, the female witness who described the incident to us did not indicate whether violence took place.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jennifer E. Cobbina

JENNIFER E. COBBINA is an Associate Professor in the School of Criminal Justice at Michigan State University. Her primary research interests focus on gender, prisoner reentry, desistance, and recidivism. Her secondary research area is centered on examining how gender and social context impact victimization risks among minority youth. Her work has appeared in Criminology, Justice Quarterly, Crime and Delinquency, Journal of Criminal Justice, and Sociological Inquiry.

Toya Z. Like

TOYA Z. LIKE is an Associate Professor of Criminal Justice and Criminology at the University of Missouri–Kansas City. Her research focuses on racial and ethnic variations in violent victimization and the intersections of race, ethnicity, gender and class in crime and victimization. Her work has appeared in journals such as Crime and Delinquency, Race and Justice, and Journal of Criminal Justice as well as in edited volumes including Many Colors of Crime: Inequalities of Race, Ethnicity and Crime in America and The Oxford Handbook on Ethnicity, Crime and Immigration.

Jody Miller

JODY MILLER is a Professor in the School of Criminal Justice at Rutgers University. Her research utilizes qualitative methods to investigate how inequalities of gender, race, sexuality, and place shape participation in crime and risks for victimization. Her books include Getting Played: African American Girls, Urban Inequality, and Gendered Violence (NYU Press, 2008) and One of the Guys: Girls, Gangs, and Gender (Oxford University Press, 2001). Miller is a Fellow of the American Society of Criminology.