Report Counters Claims of Increased Violence by Teen Girls

A report issued by the U.S. Department of Justice calls into question the "conventional wisdom" that says modern American girls are becoming more violent.

According to Violence by Teenage Girls: Trends and Context (which was written by members of the DOJ's Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention program), statistics that some have interpreted as indicating a rise in girl violence are actually indicative of changes within the law enforcement community.

Available evidence based on arrest, victimization, and self-report data suggests that although girls are currently arrested more for simple assaults than previously, the actual incidence of their being seriously violent has not changed much over the last two decades.

This suggests that increases in arrests may be attributable more to changes in enforcement policies than to changes in girls' behavior. ... There is no burgeoning national crisis of increasing serious violence among adolescent girls.

The DOJ report was written in part as a response to media claims, such as those put forward in a 2005 Newsweek article titled "Bad Girls Go Wild," that aggression and violence is on the rise among teen girls.

The report's authors concede that arrest rates for girls have increased over the past quarter century, but, they write, these statistics fail to answer a fundamental question: "Do the increases in arrests indicate real changes in girls' behaviors, or are the increases a product of recent changes in public sentiment and enforcement policies that have elevated the visibility and reporting of girls' delinquency and violence?"

By the end of the 15-page report, they have their answer. Though factors such as domestic violence, gang activity, familial dysfunction, and poverty have drawn some girls into violent lifestyles, there is little definitive evidence to suggest that today's girls are more violent than those of previous generations.

"One of the most consistent and robust findings in criminology is that, for nearly every offense, females engage in much less crime and juvenile delinquency than males," the authors write.