Research on youth gangs in Hawaii has been conducted as part of an on-going study of the state's youth gang response system. Girls' involvement in delinquent gangs has never been of the same magnitude as boys. A review of girls' arrests for violent crime for the last decade initially seems to provide support for the notion that girls are engaged in more violent crime. Traditional discussions of gang delinquency, reviewed earlier, stress the image of girls as playing auxiliary roles to boy’s gangs, if they are involved in gang activity at all. The sample was drawn randomly from a complete list of identification numbers for each gang youth contained in the Honolulu Police Department (HPD) GREAT computer system.' Subsequent to this, additional information, particularly on prior offenses, was gathered from the HPD juvenile offender and adult offender records.