Research not Stereotypes
Stereotype 2. Gang members come from very poor broken familes.
TOP TEN STEREOTYPES
1. Gangs are a Black and Hispanic problem
2. Gang members come from very poor broken families
3. There aren't very many girl gangs
4. Girl gangs are as violent as male gangs
5. Gangs today are totally different than gangs of yesterday or (or see 6)
6. Gangs today are no different than gangs of yesterday
7. Once you are in a gang, you are "lost forever"
8. Gangs today are organized crime(or see 9)
9. Gangs today are just wild peer groups
10. You can't do good research on gangs
MILWAUKEE RESEARCH
More than half of Milwaukee male gang members interviewed by Hagedorn came from conventional families with no serious social problems. A third came from families with multiple problems, like drug use, gang membership, etc. A larger group came from families with a history of one or two social problems. Most of these families fled Chicago or other cities to come to Milwaukee to escape gang neighborhoods. More on the Milwaukee research.
It is commonly thought that gang members come from the worst families in the worst neighborhoods. Gang research has consistently found this not to be true. Thrasher's original gang research found that the gang was NOT so much a product of broken families, as it was an ecological unit, a peer group of neighborhood boys.
Short & Strodtbeck's careful study of black and white gang members in 1950s Chicago found gang members came from two parent families with largely middle class values.
A decade later, Irv Spergel, in evaluating The Woodlawn Organization's (TWO) job training program of Blackstone Rangers and Disciples looked at the family background of participants from both groups.While the gang members were from poorer backgrounds than Short & Strodtbeck had found earlier, still 10% of the Ranger families and 23% of the Disciples owned their own homes in Woodlawn and near-by neighborhoods.
These findings on home ownership and family background is consistent with Joan Moore's probability samples of gang members in East Los Angeles. Moore found about 25% of the gang members came from families who owned their own homes and gang members came from many different types of families.
Hagedorn's research in Milwaukee is consistent with Moore's work and much previous scholarship. Hagedorn found that 25% of both male and female gang members came from families who owned their own home. He created an index which typed families of male gang members. More than a quarter of male gang members came from conventional, two parent families and only about a third came from "street families." Most came from "declining' families which moved to Milwaukee to get away from gang problems in Chicago and elsewhere, and weren't any more troubled than others in those neighborhoods.
While most gang members Hagedorn studied had dropped out of school, by the end of their twenties about half had finished high school or got a GED.
In other words, young boys and girls join gangs for a variety of reasons, not all of them because their home life is rotten. For some, it is the gang which causes problems within the family, not the other way around. While stronger families surely are a protective factor against gangs, conditions in cities and neighborhoods are the principal reasons gangs grow. Once gangs exist in an area, they attract young people of all kinds of family backgrounds, not just the street socialized.