Book review: James W Messerschmidt, Gender, Heterosexuality, and Youth Violence
| Author | Meda Chesney-Lind |
| DOI | 10.1177/1362480612472548 |
| Published date | 01 February 2013 |
| Date | 01 February 2013 |
| Subject Matter | Book reviews |
134 Theoretical Criminology 17(1)
provided by Phillips and Zilberg, the catastrophic if unintended consequences of gang
suppression will almost certainly continue.462769
James W Messerschmidt, Gender, Heterosexuality, and Youth Violence, Rowman & Littlefield: Lanham,
MD, 2012; 207 pp.: 9781442213715 (hbk), 144221271X (pbk)
Reviewed by: Meda Chesney-Lind, University of Hawaii at Manoa, Hawaii, USA
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 expecta-
tion 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.
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