Girl power

Campaign urges young women to assess role in starting, combating violence

When it comes to youth violence, there are few strategies that city leaders haven't tried. They have flooded dangerous streets with mounted patrols and officers on motorcycles. They have proposed entering teenagers' homes and taking away their guns. And they have met with feuding gangs in the hopes of striking a truce.

Now one organization is targeting a population that often is overlooked in the fight against youth crime: the girls who date, befriend, and go to school with the teenage boys driving the violence.

Members of the Boston TenPoint Coalition, along with Boston School Police, are visiting the city's high schools with a message aimed at getting these girls to realize the power they wield over boyfriends, brothers, and friends who may be tempted to use a gun.

The campaign's approach is designed to appeal to the teenage girl, with organizers making their point through poetry, a short play featuring actresses in Ugg boots and puffy jackets, and the distribution of purple rubber bracelets that bear the slogan "I Choose Me" in bubble and block letters.

Their message, however, is not sugary and raises a provocative question: How much power does a girl have to stop what a boy is doing?

During school assemblies, the girls are told to realize that fights among themselves, spats with their boyfriends, even idle gossip or a dirty look can spark a chain reaction that leads to bloodshed. The campaign asks young women to acknowledge the part they play in a culture of violence. It is a marked shift from the traditional calls for peace that usually ask young men to put down their guns.

High school boys "won't listen to their parents or their teachers," said Michael Hennessey, the assistant chief of the Boston School Police. "It's the girls who have a shortcut to the way these kids will react, and it's a very important thing for them to know and a lot of them don't realize it."

Some criminal law specialists praised the effort as a unique way to combat the causes of violence and instill more confidence in women.

"Big conflagrations sometimes start with old-fashioned gossip and innuendo," said Ronald S. Sullivan, director of the Harvard Criminal Justice Institute and a former public defender. "To the extent that students and young people can be equipped with the resources to deal with the interpersonal relationships in more productive ways, we can see some more reduced violence in the back end."

But some who work to prevent violence against women questioned whether the effort skirts close to blaming women or places a large burden on people who often are victims themselves.

"There is a fine line that we ask everybody to be mindful of, between empowering victims and placing the responsibility on them to end the violence," said Toni Troop, spokeswoman for Jane Doe Inc., a statewide coalition of organizations that combat domestic violence. "Ultimately that responsibility is on the entire community. Raising awareness, empowering young girls to believe in themselves, in each other, has to go hand in hand with . . . talking to the young boys who are primarily the perpetrators of this violence."

Hennessey said a similar campaign will be geared toward high school boys and that the goal is eventually to have both male and female students in the same room exploring the causes of violence.

The Rev. Jeffrey Brown, cofounder of the TenPoint coalition, said another goal of the campaign is for young women to reconsider their relationships with violent men and send the message that a gun-wielding man will be a lonely one.

That point is clear in the poem "I Choose Me," which was written by one of the campaign's organizers and encourages girls to dump boyfriends who would rather carry weapons and deal drugs than get their life together and treat their girlfriends well.

"You say you'll love me until the end, but you won't talk to me like I'm your friend. I choose me. You just wanna carry and shoot Glocks . . . cause you're reppin' a certain block. I choose me."

But the play is the most dramatic tool of the campaign. Two young actresses, who are coalition employees, play high school students and best friends named Rochelle and Patricia.

The plot is simple: Rochelle has a violent fight with her boyfriend, an apparent drug dealer who slaps her after she spends his money on clothes; Patricia, furious over the abuse, vows to have her man, a rival of Rochelle's boyfriend, seek vengeance. In the last scene, Patricia's boyfriend is calling his friends.

The performance stops there, but the outcome is tragically predictable - someone will be shot. The story is fictional, culled from different tales TenPoint coalition employees have heard from teenagers they see regularly. To many of the 200 teenage girls who saw it recently at the Community Academy of Science and Health in Hyde Park, it was like watching everyday life unfold in their auditorium.

"Females do have a lot of say. . . . A lot of the drama that happens on the street is over a female," said Samantha Allen, a 17-year-old senior with short brown hair that sloped over her forehead.

Allen said there is a name for girls who, either wittingly or unwittingly, initiate conflicts through their boyfriends, brothers, or male friends. They're called "set-up chicks," she said.

"They're chicks that run their mouths to other parts of the city," Allen said. "They cause a lot of violence."

Most of them rely on men to settle their feuds because they do not know who else to go to for help, said Allen. Many girls could use the guidance the campaign organizers are trying to provide, she said.

"School teaches you education but it doesn't teach us how to be young women," Allen said. "They don't teach us how to survive in the real world."

Maria Cramer can be reached at mcramer@globe.com.