Sociology Copyright © 2008 BSA Publications Ltd® Volume 42(4): 601-617 Ok: 10.11771003803850809 1617 SAGE Publications Los Angeles, London, New Delhi and Singapore Facing Violence: Everyday Risks in an American Housing Project 1 Talja Blokland Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands ABSTRACT Many manage risks of urban violence through constructing of no-go areas — not so +the residents there. How do they manage risks of violence? This paper approaches this question through the concepts of risk and (dis)trust of Sztompka (1999) and within a framework of disadvantage in a'matrix of oppression’ (Collin 2000). Based ‘on ethnography, the paper asks how people experience risks of street violence’ and ‘personal violence’, how they manage them, and how their discourses about it relate to institutional discourses of how to solve problems of violence. | show that violence is being accepted and rejected in their specific relation to identity enhancement and respect within a context of intersecting forms of oppression along lines of race, class and gender-Through a discourse of fate, residents tell that violence concerns the wider context of stigmatization and exclusion — which does not match with the approach of local institutions, KEY WoRDS Feminity / Poverty / Masculinity / Neighborhood / Race /Trust / Violence ith modernity, the reflexivity of risks as unintended side effects of human Actions has{intensified|(Beck, 1992; Sztompka, 1999: 38). Risks concern the unwelcome, threatening future state of one’s world, with threats coming from other people’s actions (Sztompka, 1999: 30), activated by our own actions (Sztompka, 1999: 38). Social science contributions have long asso- ated risk with technological advances, thus ignoring how people live with risks (Short, 1984: 712). Recently, the movement from modernity to late modernity has been dis- cussed as a political economy transformation that ‘challenged our notions of material certainty and uncontested rules (...) replacing them with a world of Dnnioaded tam coc sagepub com at CALIFORNIA STATE UNIV FRESNO on July 23,2015 6o1602 Sociology Volume 42 + Number 4 + August 2008 {economic and ontological] risk and uncertainty’ (Young, 1999: 29). Urban violence seems to euphemistically replace such more urgent, basic uncertainties, as political elites associate security threats with dangerous places (Body- Gendrot, 2000: ix). Changes in crime and in the nature of deviance and disorder are embedded inljthelehanging|politicaljeconomy (Young, 1999). Examining crime and deviance thus needs to be done ‘from the perspective in which it occurs’ (Hall et al, 1978: 327) rather than as de-contextualized, highly individualized deviant acts (see also Hallsworth, 2005). Place, race, masculinity and genera- tions are knitted together in the ‘moral panic’ (Cohen, 1972, quoted in Hall et al., 1978) that street violence has become. Within the resulting mainstream imagery, crime and violence become risks if and when they are not contained in the dangerous ‘inner city’, ‘ghetto’, or ‘no-go area’. Once crime and violence are associated with certain neighbor- hoods where residents are believed to ‘indulge in overt behavior undesirable by the majority of the community’ (Gans, 1991), well-covered state interventions there present a state protecting its citizens (Body-Gendrot, 2000: x), while in “those places’ demonized, usually male, youngsters, threaten ‘the citizens’. As Wacquant (1997: 342, 1999: 1644) argues, it is irrelevant that ‘ghettos’ are often misrepresented ~ residents are stigmatized regardless. Efforts to ‘design out’ crime and fear have indeed been criticized for omitting the question of why such fears and crime occur, thus taking away the focus from the social and polit- ical causes of crime (Paine, 1997: 233; for an overview see Coughlin and Venkatesh, 2003). From a political economy perspective, the downsizing of manufacturing and the nature of flexible capitalism (Sennett, 2006: 82-6) have particularly affected the relative deprivation of unskilled men: ‘they are barred from the racetrack of the meritocratic society yet remain glued to the television sets and media which alluringly portray the glittering prizes of a wealthy society” (Young, 1999: 42). This society marginalizes them as ‘useless’ (Sennett, 2006: 103). Several authors have directly connected the neoliberal restructuring of the economy to masculinity, and masculinity in turn to violence, intimate violence iid Violence enacted in|the|StreetsyClUbs|ANAISCHOOIK (Willis, 1977; Winlow and Hall, 2005). Others have pointed to the structural context that has criminalized black men more strongly than any other group (Hall et al., 1978: 362-3). As the site of urban violence and crime committed by young black men, the American ‘ghetto’ is constructed as a ‘no-go area’ for the non-poor. To the non- poor, the simplest way to manage the risks of urban life reflexively is avoidance. Meanwhile, the ghetto becomes the increasingly segregated site of everyday life of others. To women residents, the ‘matrix of domination’ (Collins, 2000), a matrix of political economy, space and gender, frames uncertainties and risks as well as identity and respect. This raises the question of how people who live in ‘no-go areas’, to whom ‘not go’ is not an option, manage the risks of violence that oth- ers associate so strongly with their neighborhoods (Hollander, 2001: 101). ‘Two common ideas of what violence means to residents of high crime areas prevail. First, dangerous areas are believed to be populated by dangerous people: all or ‘most’ residents of no-go areas are deemed part of a community Dnnioaded tam coc sagepub com at CALIFORNIA STATE UNIV FRESNO on July 23,2015Facing violence: everyday risks Biokland normatively deviant from the mainstream (Wolfgang and Ferracutti, 1967). Empirical research has, however, debunked the idea that residents of high crime {STEASTRFETMIOFE_TOISEAETOMMeviANEE|[Sampson and Bartusch, 1998). SeeoH many assume alternatively that residents of such areas can be easily categorized as ‘good’ or ‘decent’ and ‘bad? or ‘street’, stereotyping (grand)mothers and other women as good and caring, and (young) men as trouble. The good suffer from the bad, and have to take back their neighborhoods. Some research rein- forces this categorization (Anderson, 1999; MacLeod, 1987). Others show that gang members and drug dealers and law-abiding citizens are not distinct groups (Blokland, 2008; Pattillo, 1998: 747). Research on gender and violence (Ness, 2004; Rajah, 2006), girls and gangs (Bowker and Klein, 1983) and women’s fears (Renzetti and Maier, 2002) challenges the juxtaposition of good female residents versus bad guys. To understand what facing violence means to those whose agency is most bound by the ‘matrix of domination’ (Collins, 2000: 18; see also Rajah, 2006) of gender, race, class and place — ¢HatlisypOORA #icailAmericanl Women ilpubs IieUKOUSIREIUEVELOPMEHE — requires that we critically distance ourselves from these two common notions. We may then ‘avoid victim blaming that comes with lack of context’ and avoid universalizing ‘which comes from assuming that social phenomena can be generalized from one context to another’ without con- sidering situational forces (Bond et al., 2000: 589). ‘This article, then, asks how residents, in particular women, of a public housing development in New Haven, CT, USA, manage risks of violence, and how their shared accounts of violence management relate to the approach of outside agencies to increase neighborhood safety. Violence here refers to two forms of physical harm to others in the public space.' First, one can be caught in crossfire or otherwise suffer consequences of vio- lence not directed at one’s person (street violence). Second, one can be personally involved in violence, as agent or as victim (personal violence). | argue that women in this neighbourhood, a site ‘where gendered power relations are played out in exaggerated forms’ (Alvi et al., 2001: 643), do not make violence meaningful and manage its risks through the above-mentioned dualities dominating the public imagery. Instead, they selectively draw on mainstream notions of danger, mas- culinity and femininity, eventually constructing a discourse of fate. Professionals in the area too easily adopt a discourse of individual responsibility and participation in a context that links facing violence inherently with identity-enhancement (see Ness, 2004: 38). Such identity-enhancement includes rejecting violence and acting violently: an ambiguity often resolved by ‘staying away from it all’. Methods flotlpartakingiinithelesearehy During participant observations, 1 sometimes Dnnioaded tam coc sagepub com at CALIFORNIA STATE UNIV FRESNO on July 23,2015 603604 Sociology Volume 42 + Number 4 + August 2008 took notes overtly, sometimes taped casual conversations, and sometimes wrote full fieldnotes from memory that same day. Rough notes and taped conversa- tions, as well as in-depth interviews, were transcribed later. Most material has subsequently been coded for dimensions of trust, violence and risk. ‘The fieldwork was conducted in ‘the Ghetto’ or °G’, as residents called this 240-unit low-income housing development. It consisted of two dead-end res dential streets with inner courtyards and a fenced park in the front, and a gro- cery store and a liquor store across the main street. Initially, crowded tenements in a predominantly Italian 19th-century neighborhood stood here (Geismar and Krisberg, 1967: 20). They were replaced by public housing in 1942. While the surrounding neighborhood gradually became ethnically, racially and socially mixed, the Ghetto increasingly housed black families. When the Interstate was planned, actions to preserve a part of the neighborhood with historic value ~ a gentrifying park ringed by mansions — resulted in relocation of the highway, effectively isolating the Ghetto from the rest of the ward. ‘The ‘G’ was not a safe place. Shootings killed three young men in two years. A drive-by shooting from the highway had upset residents. People said it was ‘not as bad’ as the 1980s crack epidemic, but the ‘G’ was still a high crime area. All adults interviewed intensively had been a victim of violence or had been arrested for it. The structured interviews showed high victim and arrest rates: 22.2 per cent had been robbed, 50 per cent been jumped, 19.4 per cent been raped or sexually assaulted and 33 per cent been a victim to property thefts 78 per cent had seen shootings, 83.3 per cent had a friend or kin killed through violence, and over 50 per cent had been arrested themselves. ‘The article first offers a thick description (Geertz, 1973) that helps us see risks of street violence as the most generalized risk of violence least bound up with gender, yet thoroughly connected to other intersecting realms of inequal- ity. The article then shows how violence poses risks in other, more gendered, ways. It continues to discuss risk management, and finally shows how this diverts from what outside institutions would like to see. Violence as a Risk Risks of Street Violence Every year, the Freddie Fixer Parade made its way through the main Black neigh- bothoods to the town’s Green. Freddie Fixer was an African American community activist. Fixing, for example cleaning up and beautification, had been among his aims. I walked with Lili, a 6th grader from the ‘G’, down the parade’s route to meet others. Along the sidewalks people had unfolded chairs and sat waiting, chatting, drinking sodas or beer with a ‘skirt’. It smelled of hot dogs and BBQ pork where peo- ple had put grills outside. Suddenly people started running. We ran, too. Somebody yelled ‘they're shooting, they’re shooting’. About 15 of us, all women, ran into a side- street for about half a block. A woman with a baby in a stroller kept walking: she wasn’t ‘going back there’. The others started walking back. Police motorbikes drove over fast. We had run away from where a 21-year old man was murdered Dnnioaded tam coc sagepub com at CALIFORNIA STATE UNIV FRESNO on July 23,2015Facing violence: everyday risks Biokland We then met Janie (32), pushing the stroller with her baby-girl, with the baby's father TC, her son Joy (6) and her daughters Delia (8) and Zoe (11). They had brought three other children. We were later joined by Steve, a man in his forties, and his two teenage daughters. Floats with drums and drill teams, scouts, school pupils and a teacher’s union came by. Bikers in tight shirts over their muscular bodies and bandanas around their heads let their motorbikes swirl around. We chatted, cheered the parade and drank beer from a 40-ounce bottle. After the last floats, we started our way back. It was very crowded. Then there were loud bangs. People started running or went down to the pavement. I grabbed Joy, pulled him to the ground, and covered him with my body. I tried to figure out at what angle bullets would have to reach the shutters of the closed storefront I was facing for us to be hit, and wondered what it would sound like if bullets ticked against them. After some long minutes, people slowly came back or got up. TC stood with the baby in his arms, slowly shaking his head and clacking his tongue in a disapproving gesture. Janie told the kids to hold hands. Zoe cried. We walked the other way. Steve held the hands of his daughters, silently walking ahead. TC commented it was [ifiaURESS? (aiid lit heselniggers|lhad Ino lenseyStarting shooting like that in the middle of a crowd, it makes no sense, it makes no sense, ahah’, Most shootings were seen as common risks of drug trade. TC, a ‘retired’ dealer on probation looking for a job, felt that ‘of course’ it was wrong, definitely with ‘kids around’. Yet getting shot was a risky ‘part of the job’; and carrying a gun a business matter. One had to be careful. At times it became ‘too hot’. Cousins of Janie had come over from another state because of a spiral of violence between rival drug dealers there. Steve had done time for murder, but was ‘old’ now and looked after his daughters while their mother was ‘running the streets’. He gave up his gun when he stopped ‘that shit’ of dealing drugs - it was ‘getting too hot’. The cousins thus weighed costs and benefits to estimate the risks, and adjusted their behavior accordingly. But this street violence was something else. Drug-related violence usually had its order. Men like Steve complained that ‘these boys’ today were less dis- ciplined and orderly than they, making the trade riskier. Even so, retaliation and ways in which conflicts over sales and turf escalated hardly came as sur- prises. When, for example, a boy from another housing development was shot after being accused of selling drugs at a spot in the ‘G’, his nephew said he should have known better than to show his face in the ‘G” again. Wrong stated (1994: 37) order means, regularity, predictability and useful knowledge. So Steve and TC were very upset at the parade. TC was on a day out with his baby girl’s mother and the ‘craziness’ of these ‘niggers’ spoiled it: he had more trouble making sense of random risks of violence than of the pro- fessionallrisks{he had léarnt\tolnianagel People ‘manage routinely to make suc- cessful predictions about one another in ordinary social life’ as they do about other things, but ‘their predictions about human conduct are based (...) on assumptions about intentional acts carried out by individual human beings’ (Wrong, 1994: 41). above indicate ~ and yet be angry, feel threatened and be upset by the incidents That one could be accustomed to violence — as the statistics Dnnioaded tam coc sagepub com at CALIFORNIA STATE UNIV FRESNO on July 23,2015 60s606 Sociology Volume 42 + Number 4 + August 2008 at the parade is exactly because within a violent neighborhood, shooting in a crowd remained a ‘rare event’ rare events are: ... additive in their occurrence (...) and, therefore, constitute an important source of disruption to our residential life. The rare events disturb our sense of competency and sense of security, stability and permanence and, thereby, threaten a very basic and elemental need ... (Wolpert, 1980: 391) Such street violence hence affected the ontological security of men and women alike (although not with equal intensity). But women interpreted the personal violence that men faced in the streets quite differently. Risks of Loss, Pain and Chaos through Violence Women considered their neighborhood unsafe for its risks of street violence. phe drug-related violence that men whom they knew faced also implied fear of losing beloved people to incarceration or death, and altruistic fear for their suf- fering Violence itself was not the risk, but emotional engagement with men meant risks of pain. Material insecurity provided the framework within which emotional engagement became a threat to one’s well-being. TC lived with Janie in a situation in which traditional gender roles had been reversed as Janie worked a relatively steady job. Yet young black men like TC adhered to the mainstream notion that men should take care of their families. Their marginal- ized labour market position made this impossible in the legal arena. Crime, as Winlow (2001: 166) argued, offered an opportunity for financial gain. But that opportunity is high risk. TC was on probation. Every time TC headed towards ‘his’ comer where his peers hang out, Janie ran after him, arguing he could not “go that way’. She wanted him to find a job and stay out of ‘trouble’. But she also expected him to be ‘back on the block’ if he did not find a job soon, because it was ‘all he ever knew” and ‘how else” was he ‘going to get by?’. Women expected their partners to enhance their material security and to avoid another emotional rollercoaster to themselves and their children in a life unsta- ble due to flexible jobs, insufficient daycare, insufficient healthcare coverage, and financial worries. The punitive system of welfare benefits, unemployment entitlements and rent subsidies meant that a form filled out wrongly at the social service department could lead to losing foodstamps or Medicaid for children, or to means-tested rent adjustment and eviction notices when the adjustment was not paid (see also Angel et al., 2006). Timika, a single parent of 24, faced all such challenges to her basic needs. In this overall social organi- zation of ‘intersecting oppressions’ (Collins, 2000: 228), Timika feared to have to ‘go through it’ again and face more ‘chaos’ with a man. Timika’s baby’s father wrote from prison that he wanted to get back together after he came out. Timika had responded that he first had to get ‘himself a life’: a stable job. She had not heard from him since. It made her sad, but she had to ‘think about {her} kids’: she was ‘not going to have him around again and be a daddy’ and then Dnnioaded tam coc sagepub com at CALIFORNIA STATE UNIV FRESNO on July 23,2015Facing violence one day she would have to ‘take [her] kids to jail again to see him, or worse, to a funeral parlour.” Girlfriends could manage these risks through breaking up ~ parents could not. Stella’s (36) three teenagers spent a lot of time outside, which she disliked. Only the youngest teenager had not yet been arrested. She found the neighborhood ‘scary’ and ‘real crazy’ because of ‘all them guys carrying guns’. She was glad when her sons came inside. Giselle and Stella hence saw the combination of masculinity, adolescence and neighborhood as a risk of victimization and of group behaviour resulting in vio- lence. As Hallsworth (2005) noted, consumer culture and a culture of ‘aggres- sive masculinity’ may bring young men to associate with ‘outlaw groups’ that introduce them to streetcrime. (Gisele Sparen HOUgHEIESOM gH CIOHTes new seductive qualities that [crime seems to have taken on] that do not solely reflect upon immediate gratification or cultural understanding but fix on wider social aspirations and hidden knowledge. The human embodiment of professional crime is sexy and daring; he flouts convention, he gets all the best girls (...) Or at least he does so (...) in the myth. (Winlow, 2001: 166) Risks of Personal Violence Personal violence for women included rape, stripping, and fighting. Women based everyday interactions on distrust (Sztompka, 1999: 36): they assumed that one always had to be careful, because one never knew what ‘those outside’ might do and that others would not necessarily look out for them (cf. Sharkey, 2006). As elsewhere, women worried more about safety than men (Alvi et al., 2001: 639; Hollander, 2001: 84). They also framed such fears mostly as ‘stranger danger’ (Renzetti and Maier, 2002: 47) and as fear for sexual assaults, whereas it is known that victimization is most likely to occur within personal networks. Both the risk of victimization and the risk of having to act violently were encapsulated in gendered stories that associated masculinity with dangerous- ness, but femininity not with vulnerability to the degree apparent in mainstream discourse (see Hollander, 2001). As Rajah (2006: 850) has argued in her study of drug-involved women employing violence against violent male partners, inner city is more than ‘street’ versus ‘mainstream A range of cultural ideas hold currency in the structural contexts that the women who participated in this study occupy and the women call upon these ideas selec- tively in defining the boundary around what they regard as respectability. While Dnnioaded tam coc sagepub com at CALIFORNIA STATE UNIV FRESNO on July 23,2015 607 veryday risks Blokland608 Sociology Volume 42 + Number 4 + August 2008 traditional, mainstream norms regarding feminine and masculine behavior play a significant role in this process, so, too, do alternative norms that reflect the com- plexity of how gender relations (...) play out. All examples of personal violence below show such selective drawing on main- stream notions of femininity and on the stigmatized imagery of poor black sin- gle mothers combined with ‘values that more closely fit’ (Ness, 2004: 37) the women’s lives. Women were taught the main trope of avoidance to reduce risks (cf. Paine, 1997) but contexts made them take such risks anyway. Timika walked 45 min- utes down a ‘really tough’ street every day at 4 a.m.: ‘I walk to work. Ain’t no cars in sight at 4 a.m. in the morning. But no matter, I got to get to work, just to be able to buy [my son] some pampers.’ It was ‘a little scary’. No ‘normal soul’ walked around then. Timika thus positioned herself as fearful and at risk following the dominant mechanism of producing ‘a feminine subject marked by bodily vulnerability’ (Campbell, 2005: 131). But she also demarcated her posi- tion as a young black single mother, struggling to replace what Collins (2000: 100) has called the uniformly negative controlling image of black women with self-defined knowledge deemed personally important: ‘me being strong’ taking care of myself and my children. When four boys stripped a 12-year old girl naked ‘in the back’ (at the back of the dead-end streets of the development), her girlfriend explained that she had had ‘no business being in the back’ by herself ~ she had taken a risk. Other women commented on instances of rape by calling the victim as ‘too grown’ or ‘dressing like she thinks she is hot’, thus expressing symbolic meanings con- firming patriarchal control and the naturalization of rape that creates a struc- ture that defines it as inevitable (Campbell, 2005: 131). Later, the girlfriend stayed out until 10 p.m. without notifying her mother. Her mother, who never spanked her children, then spanked her with a belt to ‘teach her for once and all’ that she took ‘way too many risks’: ‘you had no business being out late like that, anything could happen to you’, she yelled at her daughter.? She raised her girl within the mainstream framework of normative femininity as vulnerable, but ambiguously. In other situations, she would send her daughter back into the street to give a girl who picked a fight on the school bus a beating, ‘just so they know they don’t mess with you’. As Ness (2004: 37) has shown in her analyses of ‘why girls fight’, street fighting is a ‘normative part of growing up for girls’ in low-income neighborhoods, and girls are socialized not to accept disrespect. This then, meant that the risk for young women of picking a fight was high. Timika thought most fights were ‘real stupid’. To Timika and her sister Sheila the stupidity lay mostly in the risk of an arrest: When fights are ‘black on black’, Sheila explained, the cops ‘don’t care who they arrest, as long as somebody gets arrested, and they don’t care what really happened.” So people called the cops on others ‘to get even’, and the cops never doubted their stories: “They came to pick me up (..) I'm like “what's going on?” I got handcuffed, in front of my mother, in front of my mother! For threatening and breach of peace Dnnioaded tam coc sagepub com at CALIFORNIA STATE UNIV FRESNO on July 23,2015Facing violence: everyday risks Biokland (...). My nephew had been fighting this boy, and [a neighbor] swore up and down that I was involved. She was screaming, you know, the cops came, they talked to us, she explained her side, I explained my side, they left, she was like “somebody's gonna get arrested” (...) we were all day at my mother house, we didn’t threaten nobody. Then these two cars pulled up, they arrested me. I wasn’t having it, and they told me to shut up, and they said they was gonna get me for interference with the police. It’s crazy. [e's real crazy.” Jealousies and ‘he say she say stuff’ led to ‘girls starting messing with me’, Timika said. Then one had to fight. Nikki, mother of three in her mid-thirties, explained (while talking about young women’s pregnancies): Here there's all this ‘who's the father’ and all that (...). Then they want a fight and everything, because he’s with this girl and then this other gir!’s supposed to have his baby, that’s disrespecting to them. I would feel that way. Jealousy may result in fights so easily because, unlike middle-class peers, young, women in the ‘G’ had, like girls in Ness’s study (2004: 41), ‘no other way to flegotiateljealowsy?. They had no access to forms of social aggression with which middle-class peers substitute physical aggression in their more supervised environments. These girls were thus ‘not defying the feminine norms or other social expectations of their environs’ — But{Selectivel PlapprOpriate femininitylas SoRSEALCTEAATASIASEEAMTICAEAS! (Ness, 2004). Women in the ‘G’ indeed fought as the expected reaction to violations of a code of ‘ownership’ of a man when someone ‘messed’ with the father of your child, although that relationship might have ended. Women held each other responsible for being faithful (cf. Bourgois, 1995) as they assumed men not to be (see also Dodson, 1998: 55). One was not supposed to have sex with some- one’s baby’s father, except when the mother had explicitly dismissed him, for example #hFOUBH dating someone else. It was disrespecting, and who was Mig feSpeCtEM had to fight. Women after their early twenties no longer engaged in such fights. As Dodson (1998: 216) argued in her study of poor young women, ‘many girls are drawn to boyfriends and sexual partnerships because these relationships are often the only tangible path to another phase in life. As do all young people, these young women want to cultivate something of their own.’ The young women in the Ghetto may have fought over men so vigorously and related it so strongly to respect because within the matrix of dominance of their lives, this vas one of the limited arenas in which they could affirm a ‘something of their own’. As they had no other forums, the public space of the neighborhood became the stage where identities were formed, acted and enhanced, with all the drama of good performance. Another situation in which one had to fight was when children fought. Women would easily get into fights over what started as a fight between chil- dren, when they went to the mother of a child that had beaten theirs. An older boy had fought Stella's son Leroy (8). She didn’t ‘get into fights usually’ but ‘it’s like something snaps in your head when they hurt your baby’. Stella had Dnnioaded tam coc sagepub com at CALIFORNIA STATE UNIV FRESNO on July 23,2015 609Sociology Volume 42 + Number 4 + August 2008 jumped in. She had not ‘really’ hurt the boy. His mother had ‘called the cops just the same.’ The police came to arrest her, but because she had no baby-sitter, they gave her a court-date. She forgot, had a ‘failure to appear in court’ and got three years probation. Mothers retold stories about fights themselves, often with an audience of others ~ most pronounced once at a waiting room of the Juvenile Court, packed with mostly silent black women with children waiting their turn. In this account, fighting stretched from beating another child to verbally and physi- cally threatening a social worker: When I was at the Juvenile Court with Janie, she ran into an old friend. Janie asked why she was there. Her friend told her vividly how she had molested another child that threatened her child, and one thing had led to another. She then had to deal with a Department of Children and Families (DCF) worker who tried to ‘take’ her children, She had fought the social worker ‘like a lion’ to protect them. Janie, who had had dealings with DCF herself, threw in comments on how she would not even let her social worker in the house and how she had to come back with a police escort. They slapped hands, laughing at the fear on the face of the social worker, and confirmed to each other that one had to protect one’s children, no matter what. This was done dramatically, with gestures and high-pitched voices. To fight when children got threatened was the right thing to do for a mother. Such stories of fights may reflect another attempt to carve out social space within a matrix of domination to replace the controlling images of black poor inner city women with ‘self-defined knowledge deemed personally important’ (Collins, 2000: 100) as caring mothers. RERWSMIEHACeETAbElsininainstreamn society as ‘immoral’, ‘dependent’, ‘welfare queens’, and “promiscuous” for hav- ingibabies(at\earlyiagestandl(outjofiwedlock. Their position as single, often young, black mothers vis-a-vis outside institutions such as the Court, DCF, the schools and social services made them vulnerable to the criticism of not being a caring mother, without much space to prove the contrary. It seemed that a pub- lic proof of doing ‘no matter what’ for your children had taken the form of ‘something snaps when they hurt my child’. S]SWORIEHIWIG Wanted IReSpeCeas mothers in a social space where they could earn this, for example among women in similar structural positions in their neighborhood, had to fight and aeepallerazy’i The staging of the drama of fights and re-telling of stories of fights in public provided such space for enacting and affirming social identities. In both situations, then, rather than a violation of norms of femininity as in the dominant discourse that defines aggression as deviance for women, viG&H@E Managing Risks of Violence Managing Street Violence: Two Discourses Social service agencies, the police, the Housing Authority (HA) and outside vol- untary groups often easily adopted the dominant categorization of ‘the residents’ Dnnioaded tam coc sagepub com at CALIFORNIA STATE UNIV FRESNO on July 23,2015Facing violence: everyday risks Biokland who had to deal with ‘the criminals’, or even ‘the guys’. StREGENGIEHCSIERINGAS about ownership of space: because of insufficient cohesion, solidarity and low ‘community participation’ street criminals had taken over the neighborhood (Blokland, 2008). This defined violence as a risk, in the discourse of agency, that residents could manage. In line with ideas of social control, residents simply had to ‘get involved with the community’ and claim back space, for example through youth clean-up days and Greenspace projects. So at community meetings and other settings (see Blokland, 2008, for a detailed analysis) the professionals called on residents to call the police more often and to help enforce the HA rules regarding who was allowed on the premises or not. Once arrested for a range of misdemeanours, people could no longer enter the projects (and could be arrested for trespassing of the Ist degree if they did). TC, Steve, and many others had had such notices, as had the latest victim of a shooting. Residents should ‘help [the police] keeping these people out’. But residents would, instead, stress that they could do nothing. ‘They would simply not tell their friends, sons and grandsons not to come SHIGE IEE HECASE OF SOME) EESPASSINE AUIS! And calling cops always meant putting someone in jail about whom someone else in the projects cared — that was immoral, if not risky. It was also not rational: someone else would take his place on the block, and when he came out, his life would be worse. Awareness of the structural disadvantages of male blacks and the disconnection of their lives with the educational system and the labor market also ridiculed calling the cops, as the women would then simply be contributing to the incarceration rates of ‘theit” black men. That residents thus did not call the cops or partici- pate in activities to claim back the streets did not result from a subcultural tol- erance towards violence, or from lethargy and passivity, but from a ‘more complicated interaction between community and value system’ (Cao et al., 1997: 376-6) to which the specific neighborhood context mattered (Sampson and Bartusch, 1998). AREntS{oflWiOlencelWErE|AISOTCOMTMURIEYEMEMbES! Consequently, resi- dents’ experiences of street violence and their discourses about it contained ambivalences that could not possibly be resolved within the discourse of agency of institutions. BRS@inigiintieigh Dorhood Acton [=EAinselCrImeTGuICKLY, challenged loyalties to male members of one’s inner circle, or even reduced a Kousehold'inéome: Inaction or addressing fears of violence within a discourse of fate rather than agency allowed for ignoring this ambivalence. Very few res- idents thus engaged in the sort of neighborhood action that institutions advo- cated. Street violence to them posed a hazard one had to put up with: it would not change. A similar discourse of fate prevailed in the perspectives of women on the risks of violence for children, siblings or friends, Janie did not want TC to go ‘that way’, but saw litele other option as a result of structural disadvantage. Stella saw little she could do for her sons to ‘get them straight’, and her only risk management consisted of telling them: Dnnioaded tam coc sagepub com at CALIFORNIA STATE UNIV FRESNO on July 23,2015612 Sociology Volume 42 + Number 4 + August 2008 ‘not to bring any of that shit into my house’. She did not even want them to bring their friends in, because “you never know what they have on them’. She ‘got them two babies to take care of’ (her son Leroy of 8 and another small girl) and could not afford someone being caught in her apartment with drugs, as she would lose her apartment then. Although seeing her sons ‘going the wrong way” upset her, she tried ‘just not to worry about it’. When we spoke in 2000, Giselle thought about giving up her night-time job that supplemented her other part-time job, in order to be able to be home at night and check on her son. She did, but returned to work a year later. Her attempt to control the risks he faced by trying to keep him ‘in the house’ had not had the results she had hoped for. Six months before graduation from high school in 2002, he had ‘gone the wrong way’ and, ‘hard-headed’, was ‘not listening’ — not to her or his father, who worked as a mechanic in a factory. Giselle speculated that their son did ‘not like what he was seeing’: his parents working hard and ‘still not getting nowhere’. Janie, Timika, Giselle and Stella all had few alternatives to offer of what their boyfriends and sons should be doing, other than telling them to ‘get a life’. They had no access to alternative ways, that, in contrast, middle-class parents have at their disposal to keep teenagers on the ‘right’ track. Consequently, they framed their fear of violence for sons and boyfriends in a discourse of fate, not agency, that was strongly interconnected with the ‘cultural landscape’ (Ness, 2004: 32) of the neighbor- hood and the structural inequalities shaping it. Managing Personal Violence: Two Discourses ‘The strategies women deployed against their fears of strangers did not divert much from common strategies of women (Alvi et al., 2001; Campbell, 2005; Renzetti and Maier, 2002). Their understandings of their own fighting and how they managed this violence warrants more attention here. A few days spent in Juvenile Court and the general Court informed me that social workers, DCF workers, and others advising the courts asked judges reg- ularly to order anger management or conflict mediation courses.* A non-profit group with a grant from social services set up workshops and classes with similar aims in the ‘G’. [NHEYlSppFOSeHEd [ehe|inaniageMmientlOfiwioz lence thus as behaviour of individuals, who could, through enhancing their Skillsg@OEbEt EM! Their discourse was one of personal responsibility, or agency, for improvement. Residents, in contrast, would see the fighting as ‘wrong’ but unavoidable. ‘They were aware of the deviant status of women who fight, and, as did the women in Rajah’s study (2006: 843), placed themselves on the ‘right side of the symbolic line whenever possible when discussing their own behaviour and the behavior of others’. In abstract, thus, women should not fight. In practice, there was nothing one could do about it. Although Timika, Nikki, Giselle and others would identify ‘support’ and chances to ‘do something about all the stress’ as needed community services, nobody came to the free classes on stress Dnnioaded tam coc sagepub com at CALIFORNIA STATE UNIV FRESNO on July 23,2015Facing violence: everyday risks Biokland management. As became apparent from the public storytelling in the court house, however ‘stupid’ women called the fighting, it was embedded within the matrix of structural exclusion and stigmatization rather than lived as a behavioural issue. Identifying fighting as a necessity also made it a social expec- tation that did not adhere to a notion of aggression as psychologically problem- atic and deviant, hence in need of repair. Instead, it was one of a set of social practices ‘to make known who you are’ (Ness, 2004: 38) — in defence and by y of prevention (‘don’t you mess with me’) and security against further vio- lence, as well as a ‘venue for identity enhancement’ (Ness, 2004). This may explain why it prevailed although women rejected it, within a discourse of fate: under certain circumstances, one had to fight. x Conclusion: Face the Violence, or Withdraw Residents of the ‘G’ would thus not consider violence as a risk that they could actively reduce. Nevertheless they evaluated violence and crime negatively, and talked often about moving to ‘some place quiet’. Lacking such opportunities, one could face the violence and go about one’s business undisturbed, as ‘you never know what may fall from the sky when you leave your house’, or with- draw as much as possible from neighborhood life. As resources for a social life elsewhere were generally limited, only the church offered a different social set- ting for some residents to withdraw from neighborhood life without becoming isolated. Even they, however, had to put up with the risks of violence indirectly, as it affected people they loved. ‘Those who opted for the first - and all women had to at times ~ faced the random risks of street violence, as we have seen in the description of a shooting, that fundamentally affected people’s sense that their social environment had an order to it. The street violence that men involved in the drug trade accepted as a professional risk, and crime as a financial opportunity, complicated the altruistic fear of their mothers and the risks of emotional engagement of their girlfriends, to whom having a partner might simply mean more chaos. This showed how it is an oversimplification to see no-go areas as places with either a majority of res- idents engaging in undesirable behavior and tolerating deviance or as places where decent (female) residents suffer the negative consequences of deviant behavior of (male) criminals. Street violence and the ways in which women relate to men involved in crime both need to be understood within the political econ- omy that has rendered black men in disadvantaged neighborhoods, in Sennett’s terms (2006), ‘useless’ and that has set the frame for the current intersections of disadvantage that poor black women face. ‘The role of fights in identity-enhancement within the limited social space that the women could claim, their neighborhood, meant going outside was to encounter competition and conflict (see also Wacquant, 1997, 1999). Walking outside meant constantly walking the fine line between respect and disrespect in everyday interactions. Frequent interactions should not been mistaken for Dnnioaded tam coc sagepub com at CALIFORNIA STATE UNIV FRESNO on July 23,2015614 Sociology Volume 42 + Number 4 + August 2008 community of bonds (see blokland, 2003). ‘Communities of place’ should not acquire a position of ‘unquestioned moral authority’ (Friedman, 1989: 277). To Sztompka (1999: 25), to trust is to ‘place a [beneficial] bet about the future con- tingent actions of others’. Facing violence meant facing others in the neighbor- hood with distrust, or a negative bet on negative expectations of actions of others (Sztompka, 1999: 26). Women who stayed ‘in the house’ as much as possible also distrusted, but withdrew from neighborhood life. To withdraw served to dis-identify with a dangerous neighborhood that outsiders saw as a place of dangerous people. It was a way of coping with that stigma, a pattern reported in various studies (Damer, 1974; Gramling and Forsyth, 1987; Wacquant, 1997, 1999). Staying inside also served as a risk management strategy in two ways. First, the chances of street violence decreased if one stayed inside or if, as did Giselle, one tried to curtail their teenagers’ time in the streets. Second, the chances to get into situations of personal violence of course decreased. For example, as we have seen above, fighting proved that a mother cared. This made it hard not to fight. The police reactions resulted in a high risk of arrest. A mother could proudly go to jail because she ‘snapped’ when someone ‘tried to hurt her babies’, But jail still was a dreadful experience. And an arrest could lead to many high risk consequences, especially once a disinterested public defender and a judge overloaded with cases quickly bargained a probation. Withdrawing thus served in these two ways to reduce the risk of having to fight, with all its consequences. s F g 5 2 sons of the diverse rationalities, codes and ambivalences of street violence and personal violence, female residents acted on the premise of a fate that they could not change. Through this discourse of fate, they were telling that the chal- lenges they faced went beyond the potential of their individual or collective action. Violence formed one of those ‘social practices that accompanied [...] [the] particular history of [US black women] within a unique matrix of domi- nation’ (Collins, 2000: 23) of gender, race and class. After all, through the political economy and cultural hegemony in which connections of bla culinity and crime and black femininity and dependency were constructed, the violence in the ‘G’ signaled and interconnected insecurities far beyond fear for physical harm. But this understanding of violence and the discourse of fate through which women expressed it did not match the discourse of institutions meant to sup- port them. The result was distrust towards other residents but also towards ‘AGEHIGIES EAEIAFE 'stipposed [to belthereFORES! This further alienated female res- idents from these very institutions, where they feel nobody is ever ‘listening? when they say, as did Timika and Sheila, that ‘this place is scary’ and ‘someone needs to do something about it’ k mas- Dnnioaded tam coc sagepub com at CALIFORNIA STATE UNIV FRESNO on July 23,2015Facing violence: everyday risks Biokland Acknowledgements Thanks to George Galster, Sara Ohly, Catherine Pope, Mike Savage and the anony- mous reviewers of Sociology for their comments. Thanks to Janie, Timika, Lena, Giselle, whose real names cannot be mentioned, and many others in the Ghetto for giving me access to their lives. Thanks to Janie, for discussing a draft of this text that I read to her. This article reports on parts of a wider study Does the Urban Gentry Help? Social Capital in a Gentrifying Neighbourhood, financed by the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Amsterdam School for Social Science Research at the University of Amsterdam, travel grants from the Netherlands Scientific Organisation NWO and a research grant of the Wenner Gren Foundation for Basic Anthropological Research. Notes 1 Domestic violence is equally important, but requires its own discussion. I have excluded this violence here, but discussed it in Blokland, 2006. 2 Such ‘altruistic fear” has received little attention in research, as Warr (1992) showed. 3. Lwas downstairs while she spanked and placed her upstairs. I personally object to this and one may doubt the researcher's position here. Such ethical questions are to be dealt with, but are not a reason to omit the material. 4 Men were commonly sent to jail, hence showing that the legal system incorpo- rated the traditional view of aggressive females as deviant and aggression as incorrect, but natural to men. References Alvi, S., M. Schwartz, W.S. DeKeseredy and M.O. Maume (2001) ‘Women’s Fear of Crime in Canadian Public Housing’, Violence Against Women 7(6): 638-61. Anderson, E. (1999) Codes of the Street: Decency, Violence and the Moral Life of the Inner City. New York: Norton & Company. Angel, R.J., L. Lein and J. Henrici (2006) Poor Families in America’s Health Care Crisis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Beck, U. (1992) Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity. London: SAGE. Blokland, T.V. (2003) Urban Bonds. Oxford: Polity Press. Blokland, T.V. (2006) ‘This place is so fucking depressing you can’t hide from it: Practices of women’s disengagement in a US housing project, paper presented at the BSA Conference, Harrogate, April 21-23, 2006 (unpublished). Blokland, T. (2008) You Got to Remember You're Living in Public Housing: Place Making in an American Housing Project’, Housing, Theory and Society 25(1): 31-46 Body-Gendrot, $. (2000) The Social Control of Cities? A Comparative Perspective. London: Blackwell. Bond, M.A., J. Hill, A. Mulvey and M. Terenzio (2000) ‘Weaving Feminism and Community Psychology: An Introduction to a Special Issue’, American Journal of Community Psychology 28(5): 585-97. Dnnioaded tam coc sagepub com at CALIFORNIA STATE UNIV FRESNO on July 23,2015 osSociology Volume 42 + Number 4 + August 2008 Bourgois, P. (1995) In Search of Respect: Selling Crack in El Barrio. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bowker, L.H. and M. Klein (1983) ‘The Etiology of Female Juvenile Delinquency and Gang Membership: A Test of Psychological and Social Structural Explanations’, Adolescence 18(3): 734-51. Campbell, A. (2005) ‘Keeping the “Lady” Safe: The Regulation of Femininity through Crime Prevention Literature’, Critical Criminology 13(1): 119-40. Cao, L., A. Adams and VJ. Jensen (1997) “A Test of the Black Subculture of Violence Thesis: A Research Note’, Criminology 35(2): 367-79. Cohen, $. (1972) Folk Devils and Moral Panics: The Creation of the Mods and Rockers. London: MacGibbon & Kee. Collins, P.H. (2000) Black Feminist Thought. London: Routledge. Coughlin, B.C, and S.A. Venkatesh (2003) ‘The Urban Street Gang after 1970’, Annual Review of Sociology 29: 41-64. Damer, $. (1974) ‘Wine Alley: The Sociology of a Dreadful Place’, Sociological Review 22(2): 221-47. Dodson, L. (1998) Don’t Call Us out of Name: The Untold Lives of Women and Girls in Poor America. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Friedman, M. (1989) ‘Feminism and Modern Friendship: Dislocating the Community’, Ethics 99(2): 275-90. Gans, H.J. (1991) People, Plans and Policies. New York: Columbia University Press. Geertz, C. (1973) The Interpretation of Culture. New York: Basic Books. Geismar, L.L. and J. Krisberg (1967) The Forgotten Neighborhood: Site of an Early Skirmish in the War on Poverty. Metuchen, NJ: The Scarecrow Press. Gramling, R. and C.J. Forsyth (1987) ‘Exploiting Stigma’, Sociological Forum 2(2): 401-15. Hall, S., C. Critcher, T. Jefferson, J. Clarke and B. Roberts (1978) Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State and Law and Order. London: Macmillan. Hallsworth, S. (2005) Street Crime. Cullompton: Willan. Hollander, J.A. (2001) ‘Vulnerability and Dangerousness: The Construction of Gender through Conversation about Violence’, Gender and Society 15(1): 83-109. MacLeod, J. (1987) Ain’t No Making It: Aspirations and Attainment in a Low- income Neighborhood. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Ness, C.N. (2004) ‘Why Girls Fight: Female Youth Violence in the Inner City’, Annals AAPSS 595: 32-48. Paine, R.H. (1997) ‘Social Geographies of Women’s Fear of Crime’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 22(2): 231-44. Pattillo, M.E. (1998) ‘Sweet Mothers and Gangbangers: Managing Crime in a Black Middle-class Neighborhood’, Social Forces 76(3): 747-74. Rajah, V. (2006) ‘Respecting Boundaries: The Symbolic and Material Concerns of Drug-involved Women Employing Violence against Violent Male Partners’, British Journal of Criminology 46(3): 837-58. Renzetti, C. and S.L. Maier (2004) “Private” Crime in Public Housing: Violent Victimization, Fear of Crime and Social Isolation among Women Public Housing Residents’, Women’s Health and Urban Life 1: 46-65. Dnnioaded tam coc sagepub com at CALIFORNIA STATE UNIV FRESNO on July 23,2015Facing violence: everyday risks Biokland Sampson, RJ. and DJ. Bartusch (1998) ‘Legal Cynicism and (Subcultural?) Tolerance of Deviance: The Neighborhood Context of Racial Differences’, Law ©& Society Review 32(4): 777-804. Sennett, R. (2006) The Culture of the New Capitalism. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Sharkey, P.T. (2006) ‘Navigating Dangerous Streets: The Sources and Consequences of Street Efficacy’, American Sociological Review 71(3): 826-46. Short, J.F.J. (1984) ‘The Social Fabric at Risk: Toward the Social Transformation of Risk Analysis’, American Sociological Review 49(6): 711-25. Sztompka, P. (1999) Trust: A Sociological Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wacquant, L.J.D. (1997) ‘Three Pernicious Premises in the Study of the American Ghetto’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 21(2): 341-53. Wacquant, LJ.D. (1999) ‘Urban Marginality in the Coming Millennium’, Urban Studies 36(4): 1639-47. Willis, P. (1977) Learning to Labour: How Working Class Kids Get Working Class Jobs. Farnborough: Saxon House. Winlow, S. (2001) Badfellas: Crime, Tradition and New Masculinities. Oxford: Berg. Winlow, S. and S. Hall (2005) Violent Night: Urban Leisure and Contemporary Culture. Oxford: Berg. Wolfgang, M.E. and F. Ferracutti (1967) The Subculture of Violence: Towards an Integrated Theory in Criminology. London: Tavistock. Wolpert, J. (1980) ‘The Dignity of Risk’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers NS 5(4): 391-401. Wrong, D. (1994) The Problem of Order: What Unites and Divides Society. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Young, J. (1999) The Exclusive Society. London: SAGE. Talja Blokland Is a professor in community development at Erasmus University Rotterdam and a senior researcher in urban renewal and housing at the OTB. She is author of Urban Bonds (Polity, 2003). Her research interests include neighbourhood, community, urban regeneration and gentrification, and relational sociology. Address: Delft University, OTB Research Institute for Housing, Urban and Mobility Studies, PO Box 5030, Delft, 2600 GA, The Netherlands E-mail: tvblokland@tudetft.n! Dnnioaded tam coc sagepub com at CALIFORNIA STATE UNIV FRESNO on July 23,2015 617