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A history of violence
In her latest book, Getting Played: African American Girls, Urban Inequalities and Gendered Violence, Richmond Heights resident Jody Miller hopes to bring attention to what she calls the growing problem of “disinvestment in urban communities.”
Miller, a professor of criminology and criminal justice at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, uses interviews she had with 75 black teenagers living in St. Louis to paint a picture of the daily hardships inner-city youths face. The resulting book focuses particularly on young women and how the combination of urban neglect and gender inequality in the inner city can increase the risk girls face with respect to gender violence, including sexual and verbal assault and battery.
“It goes back to structural inequalities, racial segregation and incredibly impoverished neighborhoods that have problems with a lack of resources, police, achieving collective efficacy and a whole range of issues,” she said.
Miller has focused her research on the links between gender and crime for more than 20 years. She entered college as a photojournalism major, but a class she took that involved a stint in a delinquency center for girls inspired her to change direction.
“I was interested in the life experiences of these girls,” Miller said. “It’s resonated and stuck in most of the work that I’ve done.”
Miller merged her interest in photography and her studies in criminology by teaching a photography class for teenagers in St. Louis city. This experience, in addition to her previous work on the book One of the Guys: Girls, Gangs and Gender, helped frame the premise for Getting Played. In fact, many of the students in Miller’s photography class were interviewed for the book.
During the research process for Getting Played, a team of interviewers gave an extensive survey to teenagers, all of whom were students in the St. Louis city school district. The survey included basic questions about each teenager’s neighborhood and was followed up with more specific questions pertaining to each student’s opinion of his or her neighborhood and the risk for girls in the community.
Miller said the data collected from the interviews was shocking. The interviewees reported that nearly all had seen some sort of violent act; 34 percent of the girls and 48 percent of the boys reported having seen someone killed. Miller said she was most shocked that more than half of the girls reported that they had been victims of sexual violence.
Miller said a lack of oversight in the city is a major factor in the violence. She reports in her book that although it is known that this violence occurs, action to stop it is not always taken. She said in these types of environments, girls more frequently become targets and are used as sexual conquests so men can earn power statuses.
“There’s always an overarching issue of gender and equality,” Miller said. “Lack of oversight and institutional equality make these places more dangerous.”
Although the amount of violence in the communities is staggering, Miller said the people living in these communities often become desensitized after being confronted with it on a regular basis. She said she, too, has struggled with this as a researcher.
“If you hear enough about it, you become desensitized to it,” Miller said. “And if I can become desensitized just hearing them talk about it, then it’s far worse for them. If it doesn’t shock me, then obviously when you’re living in the situation, you become even more desensitized.”
Miller said the main concern she has with her book is that, because it is based on narratives, readers could view it as sensationalized truth and become desensitized themselves. She said she doesn’t want misconceptions about the teenagers or the communities to take away from the severity of the problems.
“It’s a fairly common reaction to read the passages and lower it to superficial deviance,” Miller said. “But what’s going on is a social environment that is constructed by broader social tendencies. It’s the circumstances that they’re living in, rather than them being bad kids.”
Miller hopes to use Getting Played to raise awareness of the problems in inner cities nationwide. She said there is not enough community outreach for those who are victims of violence and urban inequality, and she hopes more people will take notice — not just her students.
“It’s a university press book, so a lot of the audience is likely to be academics and students, but I tried to write it in a way that’s readable and accessible to a wider audience,” she said. “I would really like to get this information out to individuals who are in a position to make a difference.”
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