Girls, Interrupted
How to stop violent crime among young women
THERE’S something wrong with America’s girls.
As the story of Michelle Carter, an 18yearold in Massachusetts who encouraged her 18yearold boyfriend, Conrad Roy, to kill himself — which he did — winds through our media, it’s easy to wonder: What’s happening to young women?
Carter is charged with involuntary manslaughter, though it doesn’t quite seem so involuntary. She pressured Roy with texts saying “when are you going to do it?” even when he tried to change the subject and, when he got cold feet and exited his car filling with the carbon monoxide that would kill him, she texted him to “get back in.”
Male violence is still the more serious phenomenon, but female violence is on the rise in a big way. A study by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration in 2010 found that one in four girls aged 1217 have been involved in violent behavior. Yet we focus on boyviolence, on the way they play roughandtumble with toy guns or on the socalled “rape culture” on campuses as if they’re the only ones involved in heinous crimes.
Another shocking story of the last year was that of the two girls in Waukesha, Wisc., who attempted to stab to death their friend and left her for dead in the woods. Found by a cyclist as her organs were failing, the girl somehow survived. The initial story blamed “the Internet” — the perpetrators told police they’d committed the crime to please “Slender Man,” an Internet legend who apparently required a preteen girl as a sacrifice.
This story unraveled, however, as the girls acknowledged they knew Slender Man to be fake, yet tried to kill their friend anyway. All three girls were 12 years old at the time of the attack.
At the same time, the female prison population is soaring. The Netflix show “Orange Is the New Black” brought the female penitentiary to mainstream America.
While it portrayed some violence and lessthansavory interactions, the prison on the show is a federal correctional facility, often referred to as “camp,” and is modeled after the one where peo ple like Leona Helmsley and singer Lauryn Hill did their bids and where “Real Housewives of New Jersey” star Theresa Giudice is currently serving time.
In other words, it won’t be where girls like Aniah Ferguson, 16, and the ringleader in an attack on another teen girl at a Brooklyn McDonald’s earlier this year, will end up. Ferguson had several prior arrests, including for punching her own grandmother, before she was arrested for beating a 15yearold girl to a bloody pulp.
The fact is, by the time prison is on the horizon, just as for their male counterparts, it’s too late to save these girls. There’s an undefined cultural shift leading to this kind of violent behavior and while we’re frequently addressing it in boys, we seem to be ignoring it, or glossing over it, in girls.
There’s a lot of talk about the “mean girl,” the highschool bully who tells you where to sit in the cafeteria and what day to wear purple. But the conversation rarely extends to the preteens plotting their friends’ murder.
In a Washington Post column last November, Patricia O’Brien, an associate professor at the Jane Addams College of Social Work at the University of Illinois at Chicago, argued that perhaps the solution to a 646 percent increase in female incarceration rates in the past 30 years would be to stop putting women in prison at all, ever, for any reason.
Pulling at the heartstrings while noting that women are more likely to have children depend on them than men do, O’Brien writes that “the case for closing women’s prisons is built on the experiences of formerly incarcerated women and activists who recognize that women who are mothers and community builders can find their way forward when they [are] respected and supported.”
Respect and support for women are worthy goals, but we need to fix our childviolence crisis before they become imprisoned adults. The goal has to be teaching the girls respect — for themselves, their communities and the law, with the same lessons about their actions and the repercussions that we give the boys.
Girls need to be taught the same lessons in accountability as boys. The earlier we start doing so, the better.