What is it about?
In Chicago, the share of shooting victims who are women has roughly doubled since 2018. This paper asks why. Drawing on the city's public crime and shooting records for 77 community areas from 2008 to 2024, it traces the rise to the street. The increase concentrates in public space, more than four times what happens indoors, with women hit as bystanders to street gunfire. As Chicago's large gangs splintered into small block-level groups, the rough discipline that once kept gunfire aimed at rivals broke down, and stray shooting reached people who were never the target.
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Photo by Josh Sonnenberg on Unsplash
Why is it important?
It changes who counts as a victim of gun violence, and how cities try to prevent it. Prevention that treats a woman who is shot as a domestic-violence case will miss the women being hit on the street. The paper also shows that what matters is not which gang controls a block, but whether any stable order holds at all. When armed authority collapses, women absorb the violence it leaves behind. The mechanism travels beyond Chicago, which makes it useful for other cities, including in Latin America.
Perspectives
I study criminal governance and elections in Rio de Janeiro, and I came to Chicago as a visiting researcher at UIC. From that angle the American case looked familiar, and that outsider lens is what let me see the pattern.
Igor Lins
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Criminal Order and Gendered Violence: Gang Control, State Repression, and Violence Against Women in Chicago, June 2026, Center for Open Science,
DOI: 10.31235/osf.io/6yrka_v1.
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