Why our daughters are so angry

For the last twenty-two years, I have had the opportunity to pour into the lives of young women between the ages of 13 and 19. In mentoring and assisting these young women, I noticed a trend amongst the girls who demonstrated the most extreme or at-risk behavior; that trend was anger. Anger manifests itself in many ways, however, in young teenage girls, it is often a response to feeling powerless. It is often this sense of powerlessness that fuels the anger in some of our girls, and leads to at-risk behavior. Admittedly, the sense of powerlessness is not unique to girls, however, when perpetuated in a society that teaches women and girls, particularly black women and girls, that they are second-class citizens, an early introduction to feeling powerless deconstructs any sense of value or worth.

Moreover, the sense of powerlessness is reinforced emotionally when those same girls who live in an inequitable society experience abuse, poverty or hopelessness. Now here is the kicker…almost every girl that I have encountered who acts out of anger or rage, experienced their first feeling of being powerless from someone they trusted. This is key, because our initial nucleus is supposed to gird us as humans before society works to dismantle us. Typically, it is in the home or our immediate community that we learn about relationships, roles, and family or social dynamics. We should be taught how to dream, work hard, love, have discipline, set goals, etc. Those teachings are independent of class or status. It only takes love and dedication to convey these kinds of abstract concepts to children. In this sense, even a female African child in a society of white male privilege can have pride and a sense of value, that won’t be easily shaken. But when our daughters witness their mothers making choices that scream against their worth, or forced to process adult scenarios with a childish temperament, you will see riotous, angry young women barreling down a path of self hatred, drenched with the need to control and committed to acts of madness with respect to their lives and their futures. There are an undocumented number of hours that mentors spend listening to young women wrestle with articulating the motives or logic behind their at risk actions. I have witnessed girls in anger stages that translate into promiscuity, violence, eating disorders, and substance abuse. Interestingly, these at-risk behaviors seem universal for angry teenage girls; however, girls in urban or rural areas are often burdened with the additional task of having to deal with limited resources, poor education, and, for girls of color, a media industry that uses propaganda to convince them that they are only good for their body parts. Our daughters are angry because we are raping and demeaning them. We are raping them physically, and we are raping them emotionally; and they feel defenseless. Our daughters feel powerless before they can even understand the meaning of the word. But true to the spirit of a girl, they find ways to take back their power, even if it means sacrificing their lives. For example, when I worked as a Moms First outreach worker, I encountered hundreds of young women who became pregnant as teenagers. Getting pregnant was not always an act of rebellion or self-hate. The truth is, girls get pregnant for many reasons; some were pregnant because they, along with their partner, planned to get pregnant. Others simply were not careful. Some had no connection with the reality of being a parent, and simply wanted the attention and coddling that pregnancy typically invokes from loved ones. Others didn’t mean to get pregnant, but couldn’t afford abortions. Older men manipulated some girls with gifts and meeting basic needs and the pregnancy was a way for each person in that scenario to secure the relationship. Others had no real association with their body outside of seeing themselves as the object of someone else’s needs; in this instance, the baby is just the byproduct of an act.

Still, I would say the number one reason I get when I ask girls about their pregnancy is “I wanted someone to love me.” In this case, the baby represents something that the girl can love. The baby is something to make them feel at peace. For many of these girls, the baby means there will be at least 40 weeks where they won’t identify with feeling angry or powerless. Another behavior that happens to be on the rise amongst angry girls is the use of violence to resolve conflict. It’s well settled that violence is a learned behavior and I believe that as an act of survival, some girls who feel powerless, quickly size up the power structures in their immediate lives. I have witnessed girls assume male associated behavior in order to present themselves as powerful. Unfortunately, the perceived male behavior that some girls associate with power is the ability to dominate others physically. The relationship between violence and anger is sort of like the chicken and the egg theory; they breed one another. If violence proves effective in making a girl feel powerful, it typically becomes the toxin of choice by the time she becomes an adolescent.

Ultimately, our girls are angry for many reasons; there is no silver bullet here. Things like being objectified at every turn, exploited at home and in society, confronted with images that are demeaning, treated as toys for the pleasure of men, shunned or ostracized by older matriarchs enveloped in their own self hate and insecurity, poor education, limited number of programs that speaks to their needs, partners who are not sophisticated or confident enough to love them, and a community of children and loved ones that makes demands on them in spite of it all. This is particularly true for girls of color. Most young girls of color in urban areas witness the women in the community taking care of children, going to work, and making sure the family’s basic needs are met. Girls of color in urban areas are trained early that women get things done. They learn that they don’t have time to nurture or heal themselves. Some of our daughters of color are angry because in our communities, where typically women make up the head of household, they tend to raise the daughters and love the sons. In this same spirit, many of our girls are angry because they don’t get a chance to be girls for long. They have to be mothers and wives, social workers and breadwinners before they can develop their pre-frontal cortex. (The CEO of our brain, which helps humans control impulses.) This part of the brain develops after adolescence, which means most of the time, it’s natural for teenagers to resist order and instruction and make decisions in haste; other words, it’s typical for them to grapple with impulse control. But for our girls who live with an undercurrent of anger thriving through their emotional and intellectual framework, the challenge becomes all the greater. Essentially our girls have their innocence stripped away too early through some social construct or a vehicle of influence or power. And for girls of color there is an additional plight, which is best characterized by Dr. Martin Luther King’s depiction of the effect of racial injustice on innocence; clouds of inferiority tend to form in their mental skies. In this sense, not only are their circumstances telling them they are not worthy, but society is there to underpin this notion again and again. Sadly, for girls of color, they don’t just get it from their society, like many of their foremothers, they get it FIRST from their homes and their communities. © 2010 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED