Arriving at a better understanding of women and girls’ involvement in urban gun violence
Black women and girls connected to “the streets” — a social world where street culture and strategies for survival shape everyday life — and the criminal justice system are critical to understanding urban gun violence, yet they are chronically overlooked. In cities like Chicago, Philadelphia, Boston, Brooklyn, Wilmington and Baltimore, many of these women move through daily life to the persistent rhythm of inequality, navigating systems and interactions that shape their risks, choices, survival and, at times, involvement in street life.
We know this reality intimately through our work. One of us, Brooklynn, an assistant professor at the University of Maryland, College Park, in the Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice, uses participatory action research, which is a collaborative approach to research conducted with communities rather than on them. The other, Necole, is the co-founder and site manager of the Women’s Center at Chicago CRED, a leading gun violence intervention organization working directly with women who have been shot, are at risk of being shot or are at risk of perpetrating violence.
What we see on the ground — and what research increasingly confirms — is that urban gun violence is not randomly distributed. It is concentrated within tightly connected social networks and neighborhoods impoverished by decades of government underinvestment, bearing the brunt of intensive policing and the accumulated trauma of repeated violence and loss. Understanding these patterns requires looking beyond the young men most often reflected in violence statistics and examining the broader web of interpersonal relationships and survival strategies that surround and shape their lives.
Within these networks, a relatively small number of people in specific neighborhoods experience and are involved in a disproportionate share of violence in urban communities. Although men are overwhelmingly the primary perpetrators and victims, Black women and girls are deeply embedded in these same social worlds — as romantic partners, family members, witnesses, survivors and sometimes participants — placing them at the center of the environments that drive urban violence.
In practice, this means the women we work with are often mothers raising children amid persistent institutional surveillance and threats of violence, sometimes while supporting sons, daughters or other loved ones entangled in the criminal justice system. Others are sisters, partners and caretakers connected to men involved in street life or facing charges for illegally carrying firearms, absorbing the emotional, financial and social consequences that follow. Many are themselves survivors of violence or incarceration, experiences that shape how they assess danger, build trust and make decisions about safety and survival.
These overlapping exposures are reflected in broader population-level patterns. Homicide is still the second leading cause of death for Black women and girls ages 15 to 24, who are killed at significantly higher rates than other young women. They are also 4 times more likely to be murdered by an intimate partner than white women. Black women are more likely to witness shootings, see the aftermath of violence or hear about violent incidents involving people they know. Black girls, too, face elevated risks in school settings, where they are more likely to be threatened or injured with weapons and report higher levels of physical fighting than white girls.
These exposures carry broader consequences: Black women and girls are more likely to experience poorer physical and mental health tied to fear of violence and are more likely to miss school due to safety concerns. Their close social ties to Black men and boys also mean they are disproportionately affected when a loved one is lost to gun violence.
To be clear, women are not simply on the margins of gun violence. Some are actively involved, at times fueling or escalating conflicts or even pulling the trigger themselves. Others act as peacemakers, working to mediate disputes between groups in their communities. These roles shift over time, reflecting how women adapt to the ongoing pressures of inequality, violence and everyday survival.
Three factors consistently shape their involvement in gun violence: early exposure to trauma, engagement in street life as a space of resilience and survival and entry into street networks through close relationships with men.
Early trauma is often the entry point.
Many of the women we’ve worked with describe complex childhoods in which love existed alongside instability, violence and loss. Family bonds and care were present, but so too were the conditions that made safety uncertain and survival a persistent concern, such as parents who struggled with substance abuse.
As Angela in Chicago explained, “I’m from love and blood. I am from my granny and momma’s crib.” Dreya similarly recalled, “I have a hardworking mother who supports me in everything.” These accounts reflect the presence of nurturing relationships that coexist with exposure to harm.
At the same time, many recall experiences of abuse or neglect, which often manifested as intimate partner violence in adulthood. In one sample of street-identified Black women ages 16 to 54, we found that more than a third reported having experienced serious physical injury, a quarter reported sexual victimization, 10% had been shot, and nearly 20% had been stabbed. Almost all had witnessed a shooting, over half knew someone who had been chased by a gang, and nearly all had lost a friend or family member to gun violence.
Similar patterns emerge in almost every city we’ve examined. A majority of women reported regular exposure to shootings within their immediate social networks, and many described routine decisions shaped by the anticipation of violence — where to go, who to associate with and how to respond to perceived threats.
Kia in Wilmington recalled running from gunfire as a child: “Yeah, I done dodged a lot of bullets. … Bullets flying over my head, I was only about 5 or 6. We’re running this way, and the shooter is actually shooting that way too, so we just hope that we don’t get shot in our back while we’re running. So it was just like, ‘OK, we made it!’”
Early trauma does more than increase vulnerability; it recalibrates responses to threat. Like men, women who grow up in chronically violent environments often develop what researchers describe as hypervigilance — a heightened awareness of danger that can lead to both protective and retaliatory behaviors. In this context, carrying a weapon, aligning with armed individuals or participating in violence can be understood not simply as criminal acts but as adaptations to persistent insecurity. This is not to excuse the behavior, but to explain it.
Street life is often understood as survival, not deviance.
For Black women and girls, involvement in “the streets” can reflect resilience — an adaptive response to concentrated disadvantage. It also reflects how people make meaning of their lives and well-being while navigating hardship, finding stability and purpose in conditions with few conventional pathways.
At the same time, economic precarity, housing instability and limited access to formal employment can push women toward informal and illicit economies, where exposure to violence is heightened.
Crucially, these conditions combine to foster what many women described as a logic of survival. In our interviews, they spoke candidly about the need to protect themselves in environments where formal systems — particularly policing — were viewed as unreliable or even harmful.
As one young woman in Philadelphia rationalized, “I don’t carry a gun because I fear police. I carry because I fear dying. I carry because I fear someone hurting my family. It’s not about wanting to be tough. It’s about not being caught slipping.”
This survival logic often blurs the line between victimization and participation. Women may carry firearms for protection. They may relay information between groups, de-escalate disputes, or step into conflicts involving partners, family members or close friends. These roles are fluid and situational, shifting in response to immediate risks and social ties.
For many, entry into street life occurs through men — but does not end there.
Intimate relationships are a key pathway through which women become embedded in violent social networks. Romantic partners, family members and close male friends often serve as initial points of connection to street-based activity.
Across our studies, women frequently described becoming involved in high-risk environments through boyfriends or relatives already engaged in “the streets,” often characterizing their involvement as “getting caught up” in activities tied to those relationships.
Tati in Chicago married a man involved in crime, and they had five children. During the course of her marriage, she faced a series of criminal charges related to her connection to her husband and his circle, including taking a gun-related charge for him. It wasn’t until his untimely violent death that she realized just how entangled she was in his social world.
For women like Tati, these relationships offer forms of stability and status that had previously been out of reach — more consistent housing, access to material resources and a sense of reputation within distressed communities. They also provide companionship — a partner to call their own in environments where men are too often absent due to incarceration or premature death. For some, they also carry aspirations toward a more traditional sense of family life, including the possibility of partnership, stability and building a household together. In this context, such relationships can feel not only meaningful but viable — offering emotional grounding and, at times, economic opportunity.
As a result, these women can take on risky roles produced within constrained environments and mediated through their relationships with the men in their lives. They may be called upon to purchase or store weapons, acting as intermediaries in the underground gun market through a process called straw purchasing. Straw purchasers buy firearms from a licensed firearms dealer on behalf of another person, leading to an unquantifiable number of illegal guns on the streets. One study finds that, though women in Philadelphia commit less than 10% of the city’s shootings, they make up nearly a quarter of those arrested for buying guns on behalf of people legally barred from owning them.
One of us (Brooklynn) partners with the Boston-based nonprofit We Are Better Together, which helps lead Operation LIPSTICK (Ladies Involved in Putting a Stop to Inner-City Killing), a public health and safety initiative aimed at educating women on the dangers of trafficking, supplying and holding illegal firearms. She works closely with Ruth Rollins, a domestic violence counselor and advocate for homicide victims and their families, who lost her son to gun violence in 2007. Operation LIPSTICK also highlights the link between women’s involvement in gun trafficking and domestic violence, showing how coercion often plays a central role, with women pressured into participation in exchange for money, drugs or other resources.
Similarly, some women in “the streets” are part of predominantly male crews or cliques and are assigned roles that involve luring men into situations where they can be harmed or robbed, sometimes referred to as “setting up” or “backdooring” men. In this context, women often rely on femininity to secure male victims, but may also face sexual and economic manipulation from the men within that network.
In short, women’s involvement in street-based violence is deeply shaped by the relationships around them rather than occurring in isolation. Understanding these dynamics is essential for moving beyond individual-level explanations and toward policies that address the social conditions and relationships that magnify risk. The 2022 Bipartisan Safer Communities Act — the most significant federal gun legislation since the Brady Act nearly three decades earlier — marked a recent step toward curbing illegal gun transfers and straw purchasing.
Toward a new understanding of women’s roles in gun violence
Taken together, these findings paint a more complex picture than dominant narratives often capture. Black women and girls are not simply bystanders to urban gun violence, nor are their experiences fully captured by frameworks that treat them only as victims. Their roles are dynamic and relational — shaped by trauma, structural inequality and the social networks through which they move. Women’s involvement can range from witnessing and surviving violence to mediating conflicts, facilitating illegal activities within their networks and, in some cases, direct participation. These roles shift over time as relationships, responsibilities and circumstances evolve.
Interventions that overlook women’s connections to violent social networks — or that fail to account for how trauma and survival strategies shape decision-making — risk missing key points of engagement. A more effective approach recognizes and responds to the complicated set of pathways into risk.
First, cities should adopt gender-responsive approaches within community violence intervention (CVI) systems, particularly for women at greatest risk of causing harm. Many existing efforts have been designed around the experiences and risk profiles of young Black men, leaving women’s pathways into violence — and their needs — underaddressed. Gender-responsive CVI might include women-led outreach teams, conflict mediation tailored to women’s interpersonal and family relationships, and supports that address caregiving, housing, economic insecurity and histories of victimization alongside risks of violence involvement. Doing this well will require different program models, credible messengers with experience navigating women’s street networks and a more robust funding pipeline.
Since 2019, Chicago CRED has expanded its work to include women alongside its longstanding male-focused efforts. Women identified by outreach workers enter a structured engagement process that begins with assessment and stabilization, followed by trauma-informed supports such as trauma stress management and nonaggression programming. Each participant is paired with a multidisciplinary team that may include an outreach worker, life coach, clinician, education tutor and later a job coach, who provides support for up to 18 months. The program then moves through a sequenced set of phases — from outreach and stabilization to cognitive behavioral programming, workforce preparation and long-term employment support — with an emphasis on addressing trauma, strengthening decision-making, and expanding economic opportunity through education, training and certifications. The goal is not simply to move women out of street life, but to expand the relationships and opportunities available to them beyond networks where violence may be normalized or necessary for survival. Success means less involvement in gun violence, greater safety and stability, and stronger connections to people, institutions and economic opportunities that make a different path viable.
Second, services should be accessible outside of traditional entry points. Women connected to violence through partners, relatives and other social ties may never enter the reentry programs or violence intervention systems designed around those directly involved in violence. Embedding supports in local community-based organizations, neighborhood centers and other trusted settings can reach women earlier — and provide resources that make them less dependent on relationships that may expose them to violence, legal risk or economic instability.
Third, effective responses must be coordinated across systems. For women whose exposure to violence is embedded in intimate and family relationships, stepping away from a dangerous relationship or network may also mean losing housing, income, childcare, transportation or social support. Housing, workforce development, childcare, trauma services and other supports therefore need to work together to make safer alternatives realistic — not simply available.
Finally, sustained public investment is essential. Changing women’s exposure to violence may require changing the conditions that make particular relationships and networks necessary for survival in the first place. Short-term or fragmented programs cannot provide the stability needed to build alternative sources of economic security, social support and safety.
Together, these approaches move policy beyond simply offering women more services. They recognize that reducing women’s involvement in and exposure to gun violence also requires expanding the relationships, resources, and opportunities available to them beyond networks where violence is a recurring feature of everyday life.
