Either way, the lesson is the same: Sex between a man and a woman may take two in private, but once it gets into the public arena, he’s the one who gets to define it — and to define her. Should this lead to a scandal, the first thing to go is her “credibility,” her right to be the one who says what happened, what it meant. “I never had sex with that woman.” There was even speculation that she had imagined the whole thing; reporters dug up childhood friends and high school yearbooks in an effort to assess her sanity.

Knowing this, who could begrudge Monica her unwashed dress, both souvenir and proof? Or her scanning TV screens for the blue and gold tie, a signal that it did mean something? It’s all she’s got now, besides a reputation that will dog her all her days.

In these post-shame days, a “bad reputation” is not a product of how many men you sleep with, how public you are about it or how much skin you show — Madonna hasn’t got one, nor does Li’l Kim. A reputation is by definition unsolicited, something you cannot acquire by design. It’s reserved for women who get themselves into situations they can’t control. “No one would believe a girl like you.”

The other lie men tell about women and sex is the lie they tell to women about sex — that it mattered. The Monica tapes let on that she thought her 18-month relationship with the president was a romance, even love; the gift trail indicates that she was encouraged to do so.

The president described it differently to friends. “I just slipped up with that girl,” he reportedly told his buddy Dick Morris (a fellow bad boy whose own sexual scandal with a prostitute forced him to resign as a Clinton advisor), as if it were a one-night fling. And so the relationship, once marked by late-night calls and gifts of verse from the president, is emptied of content, reduced to “not appropriate. In fact it was wrong.” To be “legally correct” about it — and reduce its significance even further — the sex wasn’t even “real” sex.

Looking the nation square in the eye Monday night, Clinton offered no apology to “that woman,” as he initially described her to the public, for the “inappropriateness” of the affair, not to mention the inappropriateness of his silence as she faced the threat of criminal prosecution. He did not apologize to her or her family for dragging them through the legal hell and public humiliation of the last several months. The matter now is between the man, his family and their God. Period.

A family man once again and fiercely so, the president vowed to protect his privacy even as Lewinsky’s was irrevocably shattered. Admitting not only the relationship but the lie, Clinton retains a prerogative that is less presidential than universally male — to control the story, define it, say what it didn’t mean.

On the morning-after talk shows, and in coffee shops, the talk was of leaders and their wives. What will this do to Hillary? What are we going to do with Bill? The girl, that woman, may as well never have existed. Ironically, to give the whole circus a shred of credit, she has been elevated from “that woman” to “Miss Lewinsky” — but only to be entirely obliterated.

Lewinsky’s “friends” are now telling reporters that she still avidly scans the TV screen for the telltale tie she gave Clinton. But whether or not blue and gold diamonds are a girl’s best friend, Clinton’s public message to Lewinsky remains unambivalent: What was your name again?

The lie the president told about Monica Lewinsky may have been a variation on the standard theme, but it leaves her in the same place as any woman conquered and dismissed. She is at once branded and erased.

Though she’d promised to try to stick it out until Sunday, when I’d
be allowed a visit, I’m not surprised to hear she’s gone already. That
afternoon I’d gotten a call from the supervisor, his voice strained. L.
has been threatening to leave, doesn’t need him or anyone else, can make
it on her own. But when he puts L. on the phone she’s quiet, almost
squeaky, resigned. Two of the other girls have been after her since the
day she arrived. They can’t tell if she’s black or white, think she acts
like she’s “all that,” don’t like the gap between her teeth. They corner
her in the hallways and challenge her to fight, later, in the basement,
with no staff around to get in the way.

She has no interest in fighting them, no interest in any of the
petty power struggles that determine dominion in this tiny,
self-referential universe. That disengagement is as central to her
unpopularity as her caramel-colored skin or her fancy vocabulary: There’s
nothing more infuriating than a new kid who refuses to play by the rules.
So the other girls keep poking at her, which is hard to take, she reminds
me, because she “has a lot of anger” — the loose, swirling kind that barely
remembers its source, that simply hovers, until it finds a trigger or a
target.

Tonight’s fight had started at the dining table. L. used a
polysyllabic word, showing up her less erudite adversaries, and they either
slammed down a dictionary (by their account) or threw it at her (by hers),
suggesting she look up those big words of hers before tossing them around.
She lunged, they fought, and she wound up ripping out a big chunk of one
girl’s hair, leaving a gaping bald spot, the quintessential mark of
humiliation. (Even 10 years ago, when I worked in a group home, “I’ll
snatch you baldheaded” was the threat of choice when things went sour
between the girls.)

“It was gross,” winces the counselor, with a nervous laugh that
includes some concern — enough to have made her call me — but also a
voyeuristic curiosity that demands collusion.

“I don’t know where she is right now,” the counselor continues. “I
hope she’s not hoing.” The word sounds silly in her prim, suburban voice,
and the implication — they’re all the same — infuriates me.

When I get to work the next morning, L. is already there, asleep on
the couch. She wakes up and bounces around the office, alighting on desks,
soaking up all the attention in the room, thirsty for more. “I looove
Nell,” she announces to nobody in particular when I walk by. “She came to
see me every week when I was in juvenile hall.” The declaration is clearly
preemptive: She has screwed up and is afraid that means I won’t love her
anymore. (In the rigid emotional economy of group-home life, that’s
generally how it goes.)

We take a walk and she tells me what happened. For two weeks, at
school and at home, these two girls pushed, pulled at her, found her weak
spots and went for them with the unfailing instinct of the trapped. The
staff finally got wind of the conflict and yesterday called a meeting in
which L. and her primary tormentor were each instructed to leave the other
alone. By calling each to task in front of the other, L. explains, the
counselors had inflamed both girls’ pride, practically guaranteeing the
blowup that followed.

L. regrets her AWOL, though she left not impetuously but because
she felt herself backed into a corner — the police were on their way and she
wasn’t prepared to go back to jail. She does want to go back to the group
home, though, and says she’s willing to take whatever medicine is
prescribed her in order to be allowed to do so. She felt it was a good
placement, relatively speaking, and that had been my impression too — to
the degree that any place that takes six to eight young women, each
carrying her own load of pain and rage, and throws them together in an
enclosed space can ever be called a home. L. wants my help in negotiating
her return.

When I call the group home supervisor, he is sympathetic but
hesitant. It was, apparently, quite a large chunk of hair, and the girl to
whom it belonged wants to press charges. But he knows that L. was
provoked and also that she really was trying, and doesn’t seem averse to
taking her back. He says he’ll talk to the social worker and the therapist
and get back to me. In the meantime, he suggests I call her probation
officer.

The P.O., who has not been easy to reach in the past, returns my
call immediately when I leave a message that L. is in our office. It’s
been less than 10 minutes since the group home supervisor promised to look
into L.’s return, but this woman’s voice is like a door slamming shut.

“I’ve discharged L. from the program,” she informs me. “She needs
to turn herself in.”

“Needs to” is one of the more frightening euphemisms you hear from
institutional types, used to describe actions that they themselves are
determined to compel. L. may have no choice but to turn herself in, but on
her lists of needs, which range from love and attention to a jacket to a
high school education, going to jail is actually pretty low. But until she
meets this “need,” I am told quite explicitly, she can forget about the
rest of them.

I tell the P.O. that L. knows she must turn herself in and is
willing to do so, but would like to have some sense of what her future
might hold once she hands herself over. Such an expectation, I am made to
understand, is ludicrous. We are talking about an offender, I am
reminded — someone who “ripped a child’s hair out.” (The fight, in this
version, is erased, and “child” status is reserved only for the single
designated victim, the other girl.) There will be no deals here, no
bargaining, no “working together.” I must deposit L. behind bars post
haste, and let them do with her what they will.

At this point I make what I will come to see as a crucial mistake: I tell her that no, I will not stuff L. into the trunk of my car and return her to jail against her will. I will try to use the relationship I’ve built with her to help her make the choice to come in. I will not end that relationship if she proves herself unable to come to that decision within the next half hour.

That, at least, is what I try to convey. But I am so stunned by the chill I hear in the voice of this woman with so much power over people’s lives that my delivery is, I suspect, whiny and desperate. Despite myself, I must be conveying what I really feel: I can’t believe you would do this to her.

Two days later, at her request, I bring L. back to jail. We stop at
a bookstore and she picks out a stack of novels — Toni Morrison, Gloria
Naylor, Jamaica Kincaid — which I’ll have to bring in to her one at a time:
You are not allowed to carry anything with you when you enter juvenile
hall. At a nearby mall, she chooses a lunch of milkshakes and candy, a
child’s last meal.

“Slow down,” she keeps saying as we drive the 20 miles to juvenile
hall; by the time we reach the exit, we are barely moving, and I have
become aware of how much it is costing her to submit voluntarily to a
system that has let her down so often. It is something she has never done
before, but I’ve promised to do everything I can to help her find a
placement. The dozen books are just a precaution, an indulgence: Neither
of us imagines she will be locked up long enough to read them.

As it turns out, she is kept behind bars for nearly six months, the
legal limit for someone who has not been sentenced for a crime but is
merely awaiting a residential placement. As far as I can tell — and I try
my best to find out — little effort is made during most of that time to find
somewhere else for her to go. I try looking for a placement, but find
myself nearly paralyzed. I can’t get any details from the probation
department, have to grovel and plead even for permission to visit, since my
role corresponds to none of the categories on the little blue visitor’s
pass: parent, guardian, custodian.

Meanwhile, L.’s childhood, actual and legal, ticks away while she
exists in a sort of sleep in her darkened room, reading W magazine by the
light that comes through the crack under her door. Every so often — when
another group home administrator explains why L. is not “appropriate for
the program,” when the guard at the front desk arbitrarily changes the
rules, when another court hearing is canceled without warning or
explanation — I get just a taste of the rage that is generated when
helplessness meets irresponsible power. Your mind looks for avenues, ways
out of or around the dreadful deal you’re offered, and then, hitting only
brick walls, quite naturally lashes out. That’s why there is such random
venting in juvenile institutions — the throwing and breaking things, as well
as the viciousness toward each other. Legitimate anger is blocked off,
dammed, until, as inexorably as water, it finds another outlet.

“With freedom comes responsibility” — that’s one of those
things adults are fond of telling children. What we tend to forget is the
corollary: When you take someone’s freedom, you assume responsibility for
her, particularly when you imprison her in the name not of her actions but
of her status. That’s what I am desperate to make these people understand:
the tremendous weight of the responsibility they’ve assumed by locking up
this child. They have forfeited the right to fail to return a phone call,
to profess themselves “not sure” why a placement hasn’t come through, to
act like petty bureaucrats under no obligation to tell you why your package
hasn’t arrived, or worst of all to blame her for their failures. They
must not fail her, unless they are prepared to admit it, and set her free
to fend for herself.

Like surgeons, in whose hands lives are laid, they don’t have the
luxury of indifference or incompetence. But they are not, of course,
compensated as surgeons, and I suspect they remind themselves of that when
faced with a “hard to place” child like L.

Just weeks from the legal
deadline that would probably mean being dispatched to a crowded temporary
shelter, I find a group home that will take L., and the probation
department agrees to let her go. The minute she is released, L. springs to
life — getting a job, enrolling in community college (she passed her high
school equivalency test in juvenile hall), buying new clothes and dreaming
of boys.

Things go well for a few weeks. Then there is an argument with an
administrator, L. throws something, the police are called. I am talking to
her on the pay phone when they knock on the door.

“Don’t worry about the police,” I tell her. “They can’t arrest you
if there’s been no crime, just because somebody wants them to.”

“They can if you’re on probation,” she reminds me.

This time, though, the police leave without her. The only
suggestion I can offer now is that she compromise, play the game, do what
is required of her to keep a roof over her head and stay out of jail. When
she thinks of these relationships as real, that’s when she allows herself
to get angry, and her anger is too dangerous to her now.

She says she knows, has been trying to do just that, but when she’s
successful at it she fears she’s losing herself. That is what happens to a
lot of young people who grow up in the system. In order to survive, they
allow themselves to become “institutionalized” — such skilled manipulators
that they don’t know how to form a real relationship. The thought that
someone else might come to know them inspires only fear.

But L., astonishingly and at great cost, has managed to hold on to
who she is. She has not become institutionalized; has not learned to
structure her identity in terms of, or in opposition to, the rules and
definitions the system would impose upon her. She is smart, she is honest,
and she keeps on trying her hardest. They’ve only got her for another year
and a half, unless they manage to push her into some act that will allow
them to criminalize her further. I find myself hoping that it’s not enough
time for them to ruin her.

In the movie “Face/Off,” Nicholas Cage, confronting an intransigent
female witness, uses the worst threat of all: “I’ll send you to jail, and
your child will go into foster care.” Any audience would get the menace
behind these words; it’s only the system itself that still clings to the
myth of its own benevolence.

It’s difficult for me to “counsel” young people who live under the
jurisdiction of the foster care system because the level of courage and
patience required of them is beyond what I possess. And it’s difficult to
advocate for them because they are so completely without recognized rights
to which I might appeal.

“You met me once,” L. screams at her P.O. over the phone. “You
don’t know what I need.”

Neither do I. But I do know that we owe her, owe all of them.
We’ve taken their freedom, their right to self-determination, and now our
obligation to them is tremendous. It is the same as a
parent’s, because we are claiming the rights of a parent. For the
authority we claim, we owe care in equal measure. That’s the tacit deal
between parent and child, but we make no such promise to those toward whom
we presume to act in loco parentis. “If you needed attention,” a
counselor tells L. in juvenile hall, “you shouldn’t have gotten yourself
locked up.”

A few years ago, my neighbor took in a troubled teenage nephew.
The nephew returned home and is now serving a 10-year sentence for
robberies committed just weeks after his 18th birthday. My neighbor’s
conclusion, after a recent visit: “There are two worlds. One is the
suburban backyard world where children do as they are told and all their
needs are met. It works. But people from that world are making decisions
about children whose needs are not being met, and that isn’t working.”

To say that the foster care and juvenile justice systems add insult
to injury is more than a metaphor. These systems have come to despise the
wounded children in their care. There’s no other possible conclusion: The
hatred is systemic. While it has grown fashionable to pay lip service to
the importance of “self-esteem” for adolescents, there’s no greater sin in
the parallel universe inhabited by wards of the state than pride: thinking
you might be worth something. To think well of oneself is to think oneself
entitled, better than, and then one must be taken down a peg. Youth and
adults grow equally willing, equally qualified, to execute this
taking-down.

It’s not too hard to see where the hatred might come from. It
hurts to love these hurt children. They are angry, and they will vent that
anger on whomever is nearest. Something is wrong with them, and if you
don’t want it to be your fault you’d better believe it’s theirs.

Inside juvenile hall, I get a glimpse of the L. the system knows.
She still tells the truth, but she hisses it, wields it. I know the face
they see, the one that so repels them, but I only see it when she is
under their roof.

On the radio they’re talking about rats, and I can feel my mind
shut down. A study has been made of the permanent — not long-term, not
remediable, but permanent — effects of the absence of maternal care. Rats
whose mothers fail to lick and groom them sufficiently wind up anxious,
easily startled, saturated with a chemical fear that never ebbs. I don’t
believe it.

When L. cries on my shoulder on a park bench and says, “I want to go
home,” I don’t say, “Where do you mean?” because I know that’s why she’s
crying. Until she turns 18, L. will not even have the legal right to do
what she has been forced to her whole life: take care of herself. But
somehow, she keeps growing, drawing water from deep below the desert of her
exile. With every word and action, she lets you know that it is not “too
late” for her (whatever that phrase might mean when applied to any child).
Fiercely, quixotically, she keeps fighting for that other life she has not
yet forgotten awaits her.

The new film “187″ — about a dedicated high school science teacher
pushed over the edge by the unrelenting viciousness of his students — warns
not so much of individual youthful villains (although it has its share of
those) as of a looming, inchoate mass of adolescent evil. Again and again,
the camera hovers over teeming masses of faceless, hooded teens, utterly
indistinguishable as they lumber menacingly towards us.

Into this hellish society comes Samuel L. Jackson’s Mr. Garfield, a
poor soul who has dedicated his life to teaching, only to have a
disgruntled student stab him in the back as payback for an “F.” This
incident sends Jackson across the country, from New York to Los Angeles,
where it doesn’t take him long to discover that the kids on the West Coast
are all slobbering beasts, too. Soon his new charges are making death
threats, slaughtering household pets, etc. It’s not long before he loses
it, and starts fighting back on their terms.

So committed is this film to the perspective of the frightened
adult that it doesn’t imply even for an instant that attending a school
that is filthy, dangerous and riotously chaotic might also be difficult
for the students — who, unlike the teachers, are legally bound to be there.
Even the poor education these young people receive is apparently their own
fault (cut to scene of entire class pitching textbooks out the window).

The kids in this movie aren’t even given the out of a rotten home
life. (“We are all responsible for our own actions” is Garfield’s mantra.)
Cesar (Clifton González González), the main monster, is shown at home beating up on a long-suffering
parent, rather than (as is, in reality, much more likely) the other way
around. His partner in crime is a nasty white kid who, we are informed,
lives in a great big house and wants for nothing.

Like the juvenile justice system, like the politicians, “187″
leaves no room for the possibility of redemption. We’ve had it with the
“Dangerous Minds” worldview, that even the toughest kids have marshmallow
hearts, which can be accessed with just a little kindness from a teacher
who really cares. The kids Jackson is faced with would eat Michelle
Pfeiffer alive. In fact, they’d eat any one of us alive. So stay away.

When New York high school teacher Jonathan Levin — the son of the
CEO of Time Warner (which, by the way, is responsible for this film) — was
killed in his apartment and a former student was accused of the murder, we
chose to attach to his story the same moral: He died because he got too
close. The New York Times gave us a hand-wringing feature in which every
incriminating aspect of his dangerous intimacy with his students was laid
out. He let them too far in, we were warned, “even taking students who had
done well for celebratory dinners at restaurants in his neighborhood.”

“Even” that — his own neighborhood! No wonder they got him.

Anyone who works with tough kids will probably admit that they have
at some point been scared. As editor of a youth newspaper, I once had a
visit from a drunk, gun-wielding young man, and yes, I was scared. The next day,
another kid I work with told me what he was worried about: that I’d
generalize what had happened and come to fear all of them.

It certainly can happen. I’d bet it did happen to Scott Yagemann, the former
public school teacher who wrote “187.” His script is clearly meant to
inspire not just fear but paranoia, that generalized form of fear that
takes all comers as its object.

“187″ is effective in that regard: You’ll leave the theater more
than ready to give wide berth to the kids you run into in the parking lot.
And don’t imagine they won’t notice. It hurts a young person to see fear
in the face of a teacher, of the man he sits next to on the bus, the woman
in the elevator who shrinks up against the wall when he gets on. One guy I
know whistles show tunes when he finds himself walking near an unescorted
woman, in order to show he means her no harm. A more common response is to
glower and strut: “If they’re going to fear me anyway, I might as well be
scary.”

Those few young people I’ve met who are genuinely scary have one
thing in common: They are convinced that there is no possible connection
between themselves and the stranger on the street, the adult, the other.
Every time we flinch when we pass a group of kids — every time our hand goes
to our purse, or the lock on our car door — we reinforce that conviction.
The further we allow ourselves to get from our children, the greater the
danger they pose.

The new film “187″ — about a dedicated high school science teacher
pushed over the edge by the unrelenting viciousness of his students — warns
not so much of individual youthful villains (although it has its share of
those) as of a looming, inchoate mass of adolescent evil. Again and again,
the camera hovers over teeming masses of faceless, hooded teens, utterly
indistinguishable as they lumber menacingly towards us.

Into this hellish society comes Samuel L. Jackson’s Mr. Garfield, a
poor soul who has dedicated his life to teaching, only to have a
disgruntled student stab him in the back as payback for an “F.” This
incident sends Jackson across the country, from New York to Los Angeles,
where it doesn’t take him long to discover that the kids on the West Coast
are all slobbering beasts, too. Soon his new charges are making death
threats, slaughtering household pets, etc. It’s not long before he loses
it, and starts fighting back on their terms.

So committed is this film to the perspective of the frightened
adult that it doesn’t imply even for an instant that attending a school
that is filthy, dangerous and riotously chaotic might also be difficult
for the students — who, unlike the teachers, are legally bound to be there.
Even the poor education these young people receive is apparently their own
fault (cut to scene of entire class pitching textbooks out the window).

The kids in this movie aren’t even given the out of a rotten home
life. (“We are all responsible for our own actions” is Garfield’s mantra.)
Cesar (Clifton Gonzalez Gonzalez), the main monster, is shown at home beating up on a long-suffering
parent, rather than (as is, in reality, much more likely) the other way
around. His partner in crime is a nasty white kid who, we are informed,
lives in a great big house and wants for nothing.

Like the juvenile justice system, like the politicians, “187″
leaves no room for the possibility of redemption. We’ve had it with the
“Dangerous Minds” worldview, that even the toughest kids have marshmallow
hearts, which can be accessed with just a little kindness from a teacher
who really cares. The kids Jackson is faced with would eat Michelle
Pfeiffer alive. In fact, they’d eat any one of us alive. So stay away.

When New York high school teacher Jonathan Levin — the son of the
CEO of Time Warner (which, by the way, is responsible for this film) — was
killed in his apartment and a former student was accused of the murder, we
chose to attach to his story the same moral: He died because he got too
close. The New York Times gave us a hand-wringing feature in which every
incriminating aspect of his dangerous intimacy with his students was laid
out. He let them too far in, we were warned, “even taking students who had
done well for celebratory dinners at restaurants in his neighborhood.”

“Even” that — his own neighborhood! No wonder they got him.

Anyone who works with tough kids will probably admit that they have
at some point been scared. As editor of a youth newspaper, I once had a
visit from a drunk, gun-wielding young man, and yes, I was scared. The next day,
another kid I work with told me what he was worried about: that I’d
generalize what had happened and come to fear all of them.

It certainly can happen. I’d bet it did happen to Scott Yagemann, the former
public school teacher who wrote “187.” His script is clearly meant to
inspire not just fear but paranoia, that generalized form of fear that
takes all comers as its object.

“187″ is effective in that regard: You’ll leave the theater more
than ready to give wide berth to the kids you run into in the parking lot.
And don’t imagine they won’t notice. It hurts a young person to see fear
in the face of a teacher, of the man he sits next to on the bus, the woman
in the elevator who shrinks up against the wall when he gets on. One guy I
know whistles show tunes when he finds himself walking near an unescorted
woman, in order to show he means her no harm. A more common response is to
glower and strut: “If they’re going to fear me anyway, I might as well be
scary.”

Those few young people I’ve met who are genuinely scary have one
thing in common: They are convinced that there is no possible connection
between themselves and the stranger on the street, the adult, the other.
Every time we flinch when we pass a group of kids — every time our hand goes
to our purse, or the lock on our car door — we reinforce that conviction.
The further we allow ourselves to get from our children, the greater the
danger they pose.

Subtitled “A Year in the Violent World of Girl Gangsters,” “8 Ball Chicks” falls within the booming genre of the inner-city travelogue: rental-car journeys into and out of American ghettos. The format has some intrinsic problems — do we really believe that poor Americans inhabit an entirely separate “world”? — but, at its best, lets us hear voices excluded from most mainstream accounts of urban life. And with violent crime rates multiplying for adolescent females even as they fall for males, Sikes has picked an important topic at the right moment.

Sikes’ analysis is sparse and not particularly illuminating (“Without an effective national policy for youth, kids fell through the cracks in droves”), but she’s got a good ear and the sense to step back and let her subjects seize the microphone most of the time. Guided by gang girls in Los Angeles, San Antonio and Milwaukee, she visits neighborhoods in which traditional female routes to power — sexuality, femininity, maternity — have been so devalued that it’s better to be like the guys than liked by them. So the young women don baggy clothing, stuff weapons down their pants and wreak havoc on a society that has, in many cases, allowed them to be abused physically and sexually since they were children. If they’re fearless, it’s only because death is preferable to loneliness, physical pain more bearable than unvented rage.

In each new environment, Sikes plays up her own naiveti — a tactic that makes her look sincere, but also casts doubt on her qualifications as an interpreter of inner-city life. She fears for her handbag, mistakes a .25 automatic for a cigarette lighter and, most disturbingly, professes herself surprised that the gang girls imagine better futures for themselves. At the same time, she steers clear of melodrama and gratuitous suspense, making it plain that “the life” is also ordinary life, as boring and repetitive as it is violent and chaotic. If her story lacks the passion of first-person accounts of gang life like Monster Cody’s “Monster,” or the depth of long-term works of reportage like Alex Kotlowitz’s “There Are No Children Here,” it certainly offers a more nuanced look at the lives of female gang members than filmmaker Allison Anders’ sentimental “Mi Vida Loca.”