ATTRACTED by fun and easy money, Siti (not her real name), 17, a Secondary 4 school dropout, joined a gang two years ago.

At first, she was treated 'like a queen'.

'The gang members would be very concerned about me and ask me why I looked moody. They took me to clubs and paid for all my expenses,' says Siti, who never had such attention lavished on her before.

Her parents divorced when she was six and she lives with her father. A store assistant who works 11 hours a day, he has little time for her. She speaks to her mother, a hawker's assistant who has remarried, on the phone once a week - mainly to extract pocket money.

Over two years with the gang, Siti loitered at Marsiling and Boon Lay, smoking, picking fights and selling illegal VCDs. She helped keep a lookout for the police, earning up to $200 a day for three hours of work.

'The first time I ran from the police, I was scared. But the second and third time, it felt normal,' says the lanky 1.62m-tall teen who has bronze-streaked hair.

All cashed up, Siti and her gangster friends would book hotel rooms in Geylang and down Ecstasy pills together. The rooms cost around $40 a night and they booked up to five rooms each time.

'It was very fun. When the music was turned on, all I knew was to dance, dance, dance,' she says.

During gang clashes, her self-worth and status soared, as she was deemed 'a good fighter'. Once, when a girl provoked a fellow gang member, Siti tore open the girl's shirt, stomped on her chest, then spat at her to show her 'hatred'.

She recalls: 'The first time I fought, I was 'somebody'. At home, when I failed my exams, my parents would say: 'You're a waste of money.' But in my gang, I got a name for myself by fighting well. That's why I kept going back. My friends believed in me.'

But eight months later, Siti got sick of bloody fights and having to flee from the police practically every day. She stopped answering gang members' calls and excused herself from meetings.

But the gang would not let her off so easily. They issued an ultimatum - she had to have sex with all 15 boys in the gang, one after another, if she wanted to quit. As part of the ritual called 'rolling over', they would also videotape her naked body and circulate it among their friends.

Most of the girls in the gang considered rolling over a 'normal practice' and it upset Siti greatly. 'Other girls in the gang can give the boys their bodies after knowing them for one or two hours, but I'm not like that,' she says.

So she begged her elder brother, who is 19 and with another gang, to help her leave without paying the penalty. His gang slugged it out with hers - and won. Siti's gang let her off the hook and agreed to 'settle any future unhappiness' with her brother.

Siti, now a private school student, goes to Ain Society, a voluntary welfare organisation which helps youth at risk in Bukit Batok, every day.

She has found new friends among the other troubled teens there. 'We have the same kind of attitude and at first, we didn't like each other. But they're like mirror images of me,' she says.

Last year, Siti obtained three N-level passes as a private candidate and is now taking a course in customer service.

She is still afraid of running into her ex-gang members and keeps her head down whenever she passes their old hang-outs.

But she has not looked back on her decision to quit.

'I regret joining the gang, especially because I made my mother cry. She thought I gave my body to the boys. I thought she didn't love me. But she cried because of me so I felt I needed to change.'

This article was first published in The Straits Times on Mar 22, 2008.