Customer Reviews

Sugar and Spice and No Longer Nice: How We Can Stop Girls' Violence

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Many experts and famous people support this books: Marian Wright-Edelman, Bill Cosby, Alvin Poussaint etc. but as a parent I want to say this book has helped tremendously. The pain my daughter and I were experiencing together and respectively was enormous. This book was a really helpful step along the long road of healing. It is many tiny hurtful incidents that can leave a large wound. It is from this wounded place that people find their violent selves and lose control. This book helped me understand that and so I understand my situation and daughter better. I treat this situation with a level of understanding and calmness that I never had before. The absence of this often made me verbally violent towards my daughter, only making our situation worse. I thank the authors for calling out a problem that everyone wants to ignore. With or without the support of experts and famous people- as a real person-I can say book gave me tools and hope and combined with other measures has helped create a better life and better for me and my daughter.

This book is a required text in the Ed.D program at Liberty University. Very interesting read. Easy to understand. Good resources.

This book does an excellent job of identifying, articulating and fleshing out a problem that is so ingrained in our culture, that few people realize what a problem it is. Often it is only hindsight that offers the insight that this book gives regarding the toxic levels of violence in our society. Hopefully, this book and books like it will offer a new, more sophisticated and enlightened way for humans to solve problems. Because it is all fun and games until someone loses and eye.

Sugar and Spice and No Longer Nice: How We Can Stop Girls'

Violence (Hardcover)

by Deborah Prothrow-Stith, Howard R. Spivak

Publisher: Jossey-Bass (May 18, 2005) ISBN: 0787975710

This is another awful book on girls that should make the authors

and academics who endorsed it deeply ashamed. Packed with

sweeping stereotypes demeaning young people and mangled,

secondhand statistics, this book is another example of the fear and

hostility American adults today hurl at adolescents.

Rather than repeat my statistical criticisms of James Garbarino's

identical See Jane Hit (see my review for specifics) and the

avalanche of cloned books stigmatizing teens today as

hyperviolent, mean, and soulless, I will be blunt: These attacks on

young people amount to little more than grownup name-calling and

bullying of the sort their authors purport to deplore.

Let me buttress that charge with a simple question neither these

authors nor any others address: Why aren't they deploring the

"epidemic of violence" perpetrated by THEIR OWN, older age

groups?

Over the last 25 years, the FBI reports that violent crime rates

among MIDDLE-AGERS (ages 35 to 54--the parents of today's

teens) exploded: 217,000 arrests for violent felonies and

misdemeanors in 1980, 543,000 in 2004. In fact, 40-agers

constitute our fastest growing violence arrest group, with rates

rising two to three times faster than for teenaged girls.

Among middle-aged women, felony and misdemeanor assault

arrests skyrocketed 500%, from 18,000 in 1981 to 111,000 in 2004

(check for yourself--see FBI, Uniform Crime Reports, Tables 38,

39, 40). Among middle-aged men, assault arrests tripled from

126,000 in 1981 to 401,000 in 2004.

Adjusted for population increases, violence rates among

middle-agers--the parents, the grownups who are supposed to be

stable and mature--doubled over the last quarter century. That's far

more alarming than anything going on among teens, boys or girls.

In fact, there is no "epidemic of youth violence." Over the last

decade, FBI figures show violence by youth plummeted as never

before--down 32% for girls, in particular. Both the FBI and

National Crime Victimization Survey (our best measure of crime)

show murder, rape, and robbery by young people dropped by 50%

to 70% and now stand at 40-year LOWS. However, violence by

40-aged women has continued to rise and has now reached record

highs. Prothrow-Stith and Spivak's book is complete fiction.

Here's a sobering development: In 1975, California teen girls were

three times more likely to be arrested for violent felonies than their

middle-aged (ages 30-69) mothers. Today (2004), after violence

soared among middle-agers, the violence arrest rates of teenaged

girls and middle-aged women are EQUAL.

Drs. Prothrow-Stith and Spivak, and a lot of other PhDs authoring

and endorsing books disparaging girls, claim to be experts in

violence. They are well aware (or damn well should be) that

standard crime statistics show their own, older age groups show far

worse violence trends than teen girls do--most of it committed in

homes, in front of or against the very children and youths for

whom these authors express such emotional concern. These experts

should be writing terrifying books on mean, vicious 45 year-old

women and graying men than 15 year-old girls.

Yet, not one author I can find even mentions the leap in

middle-aged violence, property, drug, and felony arrests over the

last 30 years. It's a lot easier, much more comfortable for popular

authors to rant against the "epidemic of youth violence" and blame

fictional straw-targets like television, video games, music, and

mean-girl-culture than to undertake painful introspection of very

real violence and values infecting our own powerful, sacred, older

age groups. These authors' evident eagerness to attack girls instead

strikes me as a cowardly abdication of adulthood--and they are far

from alone.

Unfortunately, girls suffering abusive, addicted, disarrayed parents

and adults around them don't have the luxury these privileged

academic authors enjoy to simply ignore the severe troubles older

generations display, nor to retreat into comfortable pop-culture

evasions. In 15 years of working directly with teens, I never met a

messed-up youth who didn't have even more messed-up parents.

I'm sure such exist, but the studies of youth I've done since show

they're rarities.

A truly mature, responsible adult society doesn't smugly shovel

blame and stigma onto our kids--it frankly evaluates our own adult

behaviors first. This disgraceful book and the acclaim it has

received are just more examples of how troubled and escapist

today's aging Baby Boomers (and craven experts soothing us that

it's just those damn kids causing all the problems) have become.

We need scientists to tell us the truth, not what we want to hear.

Mike Males, Sociology Department, University of California,

Santa Cruz mmales@earthlink.net

After reading an article on girl violence in Newsweek, this book was sited as a great resource to further understand this emerging problem in schools.

Too bad it didn't live up to the hype. Far to many repeats of already stated information...the book was like reading in circles.

By far the most unforgiveable crime was the lack of examples provided. Several introductory pieces were used...all of about 4 or 5. Granted, my main reason for reading this book was to read the sensational horror stories, but the book completely bailed on providing us voyeuristic readers that guilty pleasure! I was also curious about the relationship of violence in regards to feminism and the new "Sheroes" of pop culture such as Buffy, The Bride from Kill Bill and other mentions (Alias, Catwoman, etc.) but they were lightly (and I'm talking a few, faint sentences) touched upon.