Girls today more violent than ever
Pittsburgh schools police Chief Robert Fazden remembers a fight more than 10 years ago at Peabody High School, involving hundreds of students in the parking lot.
The size of the fight was daunting enough, but even more surprising to Fazden was that girls fought other girls alongside the boys -- and just as violently.
"They pull hair, scratch, and girl fights are very, very hard to break up," Fazden said. "You don't want to pull them apart and hurt them, but you don't want them to kill each other, either. Girls can be just as violent, or more violent, than the boys. Girls fighting has always been an issue for us. We see it every day."
According to national statistics, girls today are more violent than they were just five years ago. Arrests of girls under age 18 nationwide for crimes including aggravated and simple assaults are up 15 percent from 2001 to 2005. Girls account for about a quarter of total assaults committed by juveniles, compared with less than 10 percent in 1980.
In Pennsylvania, 3,695 girls were arrested in 2005 for crimes including aggravated assault, simple assault and robbery, compared with 3,394 girls under age 18 who were arrested in 2001 -- a 9 percent increase, according to the Pittsburgh-based National Center for Juvenile Justice.
Arrests of girls ages 18 and younger for aggravated and simple assaults increased every year from 2001 to 2005 in Allegheny, Beaver, Butler, Washington and Westmoreland counties.
In September, a 14-year-old Harrison girl was charged with mugging an 82-year-old woman, a robbery that netted $6, police said. The elderly victim suffered a broken pelvis and shoulder, cuts and bruises after the girl pushed her down while ripping a small change purse off her finger, police said.
Experts attribute the upswing in violence to a number of factors, ranging from girls mimicking violence they see at home to the emergence of more aggressive female characters in movies and on television.
"Girls' lives are a lot more complicated than they were a decade or two ago," said Meda Chesney-Lind, author of "Beyond Bad Girls" and a criminologist at the University of Hawaii. "More girls have very violent home lives, and they are being victimized and seeing so much more aggression and violence all around them on a daily basis. And it becomes natural for them to copy that behavior."
Cindy D. Ness, director of programs for the Center on Terrorism and Public Safety at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City, has studied girl violence for years.
Ness said girls are less inhibited than they were 20 years ago, and that -- coupled with many schools adopting a zero-tolerance policy on violence -- has led to more arrests and attention being paid to the issue.
"Girls today don't seem to see a lot of incentive in not immediately acting out violently, and they stand up for themselves, take a tough stand and are very independent," said Ness, the author of "Why Girls Fight: Female Youth Violence in the Inner City."
"It's not about gender or what work society has done to break down the barriers between boys and girls, and teaching girls that they can do anything boys can do," she said. "It's that for so many reasons, they see more license to be aggressive."
But David Brotherton, chair of the sociology department at John Jay College, doesn't dismiss the notion that a rise in arrests of girls for violent crimes is tied to closing the gender gap.
"Girls do things today that we as a society used to relegate mainly to boys," Brotherton said. "They're playing rough, contact sports and getting involved in more physical, male-dominated professions. They're surrounded by violence."
Overwhelmingly, girls who resort to using violence have witnessed violence regularly for years -- whether at home or among peers, said Heather Johnston Nicholson, director of research for Girls Inc., a national nonprofit dedicated to educating and empowering girls.
"It's a very worrisome trend among young girls because there's way too much violence in society," Nicholson said. "We as a society need to figure out how to help these girls."
A project in Greensburg is trying to do just that.
The Westmoreland County Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder Project was founded in 1999 on the premise that most young girls who are engaged in violence suffer from witnessing violence elsewhere or from past victimization.
The project trains educators and those in the juvenile criminal justice system throughout the state about post-traumatic stress disorder, and provides counseling and other services for female juvenile offenders sentenced to residential treatment programs.
"It used to be that all the institutions and facilities that provided juvenile criminal justice services were geared toward boys, because not that many girls were getting referred," said project coordinator Deborah Ciocco. "That's not the case anymore. A lot of girls are hurting and turning to violence."
