Surviving the Streets: Girls Living on Their Own

• NCJ Number: 166079
• Author(s): R Pfeffer
• Date Published: 1997
• Length: 174 pages
• Sale Source: Garland Publishing, Inc.
• Publication Type: Report (Study/Research)
• Language: English
• Country: United States of America

Annotation

This study of punk-identified girls living on their own in San Francisco contrasts how mainstream society views them and their plight with how the girls themselves view their lives within the context of their subculture.

Abstract

The author reviews 100 years of interdisciplinary research on girls/young women on their own. The review concludes that historically across various fields in academia, girls are miscategorized and misrepresented, because researchers use male models of life experiences and gender-based morality as the framework for their studies. The historical and current doctrines in social science literature support the subsequent policies that are explicitly negative and negating of young women's experiences. In two chapters, interviews with 10 punk-identified young women and an analysis of the photographs the young women took of their environment (photographs not included for privacy reasons) testify to the complex relationships between the young women's environments and social relationships within the context of their youth culture. Another chapter discusses the connection between newspaper rhetoric and epistemology, based on a review of the last 10 years of articles in five national newspapers regarding young people on their own. The author analyzed the content of the articles, the number and types of representations, the rhetoric, and typifications of young girls on their own. The images developed by the newspaper industry are discussed in the context of social movements and the evolution of rhetoric about crime, science, family values, the women's movement, and the missing children's movement. This information is linked by the author to the perceptions of the young women in this study. One chapter discusses ethical considerations in working with young women, and the concluding chapter portrays eight theoretical issues developed in the study through a fictional narrative about how two of the girls might reminisce about their girlhood during the late 20th century from the perspective of their lives in the year 2030. Chapter notes, a 261-item bibliography, and a subject