Equality sought in gang intervention

It's not often that the worlds of college academics and politics mix, but Haco Hoang, a political science professor at California Lutheran University, has brought them together in her recent work with female gang members.

After earning her doctorate then teaching for a couple of years, Hoang got involved in gang prevention and intervention with a Los Angeles-based organization, L.A. Bridges, developing a policy that says women and men deserve equal resources. Also, as part of the class work for one of her courses at CLU, students are analyzing existing public policies.

L.A. Bridges needed to revise its program so that it was also targeting females, she said. "We needed gender parity in our gang intervention policies."

L.A. Bridges, part of the city of Los Angeles' Community Development Department, did not even track numbers of female gang members, she said.

Collecting data was the first step in developing the new policy.

The second was training gang intervention counselors to understand the differences between male and female gang members.

That, in turn, led to the third step of the new policy, designing services specifically for women, services that generally focused on healthcare and parenting.

It wasn't easy convincing people that such a policy was needed, especially because resources are limited, Hoang said.

Women make up only about 10 percent of gangs, she said. However, when they have children with gang members, those children are at risk for eventually becoming gang members themselves.

"We need to see this as long-term intervention," Hoang said. "No other city was doing this, that I know of. These services are for the public good. It's not a private business, so you need parity."

Not everyone agrees with that approach. Certainly, female gang members deserve help, said the Rev. Greg Boyle, executive director and founder of Homeboy Industries, which provides counseling, training and jobs for former gang members or people at risk for getting involved in gangs, but females don't need equal resources.

"These are people who are underserved and disparaged and who need help," Boyle said. "In the world, women need equal resources, but it doesn't make sense with gang members because they make up such a small percentage."

Hoang came to her work with female gang members after leaving her teaching position at Mount St. Mary's College in Los Angeles. She wanted to see if there were other ways to apply her doctorate beyond the sometimes insulated world of college academics. That led her to working on budget and education issues with Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, who was a city councilman at the time, then eventually moving to gang intervention and prevention.

In her present job at CLU, Hoang is combining the academic and political worlds in which she has worked.

"I'm asking, ‘How do we get academics to connect with practitioners and practitioners to connect with academics?'" she said. "I still do policy consulting with the city."

At CLU, Hoang also has found her political work overflowing into the classroom. This school year, when she taught a class on politics and women, Hoang asked her students to analyze existing public policies, considering who they would affect and how feasible they were.

For a final project, the students had to develop their own policy, then vet it with the rest of the class, which judged it on feasibility, clarity and rationale.

"It made them feel smart that they could apply this knowledge outside the classroom," Hoang said. "They were seeing the community as an extension of the classroom."