8-Ball Chicks: A Year in the Violent World of Gangster Girls8-Ball Chicks: A Year in the Violent World of Gangster Girls is a fascinating insight into the lives of women in gangs. The book highlights two things: these women exist and they are crying out for help. The book's author, Gini Sikes, is a New York-based journalist who spent two years chronicling the world of these girls and women in three cities: Los Angeles, San Antonio and Milwaukee. Throughout her travels, she immersed herself in the lifestyle of each gang. What she discovered on her journey through backyards, living rooms and housing projects was surprising. There are perhaps thousands of girls in gangs across the country, and yes, many of them are violent. Sikes' portrait of women's gangs in America will both shock and move you. She goes well beyond the usual clichés and shows a rarely seen depth in her subjects. These girls carry razor blades in their mouths and fight just like their male counterparts, but many of them overcome enormous adversity to get out of their gangs and turn their lives around. Sikes reports on these gangster girls with compassion and honesty, convincingly raising the issue of our struggling urban youth without posturing or preaching. Sikes details the girl's reactions to him and to her own environment. 8-Ball Chicks depicts everything from gang members' stories of dangerous initiation rites (girls knowingly having sex with an AIDS-infected boy; initiations to gang rape; aspiring gangs allowing a dozen girls to beating them at the same time) right down to the conditions that push these young women to join gangs in the first place. Most of these girls she discovered entered gangs for power and belonging. They didn't care about being hurt, as survival became their primary recourse. If they survived the abuse and poverty, then they felt powerful. In 8 Ball Chicks, we learn about the fear and desperate desire for respect and status that drive girls into gangs in the first place, as well as the dreams and ambitions that sometimes help them escape the trap of their existence. Dismissed by the police As mere deputies or escorts of male gangs, girl gang members are in fact often as emotionally closed off and dangerous as their male counterparts. Carrying razor blades in their mouths and guns in their jackets to defend themselves, they start drive-by shootings, carry out carjackings, trample strangers who fall or dare enter the neighborhood, viciously retaliate against other gangs and fiercely protect their territory..