It's about to be a WHAT? Girl fight

By Matt Wood in News on Feb 15, 2006 4:08PM

How often do you read a Sun-Times headline that looks like it was plucked straight from a subject line in your spam folder? "Girl-vs.-girl fighting up in city schools" looks like something we'd pause and giggle at as we were browsing our junk mail, but when we saw it in the big boy paper, we had to read it.

The story reported on a spike in assaults and fighting by girls in Chicago Public Schools. Fights are up 31 percent; assaults, 18; and battery, 15. It quotes an expert who blames the increase in violence on movies, music, and video games where young girls learn that, "it's a good thing that she can 'kick butt'--a way to earn popularity and respect." We're also reminded of the violent hazing incident at Glenbrook North High School involving girls, and string of attacks in Washington Park.

But at the same time, we learn that overall, violent incidents involving girls are down 10 percent, aggravated assault and battery are down, and battery resulting in injury is way down, 55 percent so far this year, so we can't tell if it's a real trend or just an troubling confluence of statistics. Still though, 207 girl-fights involving injuries seems like a lot, even in all those schools. We're curious about how these numbers stack up to fights among males (do we get to call those "boy-fights"?) A related Sun-Times article about See Jane Hit, a book by James Garbarino on violence among girls, says that one girl is arrested for assault for every four boys. We could probably look up the rest of those statistics ourselves, but we'd rather do what the best bloggers do and rely on conjecture to perpetuate hysteria and outrage. We heard this story about a girl in our friend's niece's school who watched Alias and then was all, "I'm gonna kick your ass," so we're pretty sure it's a big problem.