For more black girls, a violent cycle

• Six percent of young black women have been injured in school fights, compared with 4 percent of Hispanic and 2 percent of white girls.

• 14 percent of black teenage girls report being injured by boyfriends, compared with 11 percent of Hispanic girls and seven percent of white girls.

"Disproportionately, young African-American and Latino women go to school in ... communities where violence is more common," says Heather Johnston-Nicholson, research director for Girls, Inc. "If you're learning violence as a way to survive, you may resort to it."

The key to breaking the cycle, according to Ms. Johnston-Nicholson and other experts, is creating places where girls are comfortable and safe, released from the perceived need to fight, carry knives, or hang out with other tough girls.

That's what Ms. Sapp-Grant set out to do with "Blossom," an after-school and weekend program designed to give young women like Nikki constructive ways of spending time. Housed in what were once the cluttered closets of The First AME Zion Church in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of New York, it offers everything from writing workshops to step-dance classes. Sapp-Grant based the concept for the program on the very things she was looking for when, in high school, she joined the notorious Deceptonettes gang.

"Blossom has a strong sense of cohesiveness and protection and love - all of those things that young people crave," she says. "We take the things that make the gangs so exciting and attractive to young people and adopt them."

Nikki didn't want to come. But it was this or the juvenile-justice system. And after two months, she's glad she came. "I didn't want to be helped at first," she says, cuddling a visiting puppy. "I never wanted people bothering me or talking to me." But Nikki hasn't had a fight since. She smiles more. And she's found something she wants to do "when I grow up": be a cosmetologist.

That's the kind of success that gives Sapp-Grant hope for expanding her two-year-old program. She'd like to see Blossom's concepts woven into the juvenile-justice system. And, indeed, most experts agree that the system still has strides to make in dealing with all kinds of young women.

"We keep hearing that the needs of young women in the juvenile-justice system are unique, as if they were rare birds instead of a quarter of the population," says Johnston-Nicholson. "Until we start getting people competent in understanding the lives of these young women, we're going to continue to have this increase."

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