UK: Bad girls: An investigation into a new breed of young women

Article here. Excerpt:

'Recently, a former armed robber offered to show me how teenage girls are moving in on the drugs market.

As we stood on a city street corner, he dialled a number and asked the person who replied if they had ‘a little ting’ for him — street slang for a parcel of drugs.

Within minutes, a slim and pretty girl, aged no more than 15, had appeared at our side.
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He admitted he was astonished — even envious — of the ‘success’ girls like this were enjoying as drug dealers on his estate.

‘They’ve got money on them all the time. They always dress sharp. They may be only 14 or 15, but they never wear the same trainers more than two days in a row.’

Our experience on a North London street corner is no aberration — it’s symptomatic of what’s happening all over the country.
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While criminal offences by young men have fallen, those committed by girls aged 10 to 17 have increased by 25 per cent over the past three years.

Worse still, their violent offences have gone up by a staggering 50 per cent.
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The courts bear this out. In April last year, two attractive 17-year-olds, Ruby Thomas and Rachael Burke, went on trial for attacking a man in Trafalgar Square, in the centre of London. Their male companion had knocked him down because he was gay.

The girls then kicked him in the head and stamped on his chest. He later died of brain damage. They also repeatedly punched in the face a man who tried to intervene.

Thomas, who’d attended the £12,000-a-year Sydenham High School for Girls, joked about their vicious attack the next day on Facebook. One onlooker likened the level of the girls’ violence to ‘a scene from the film Clockwork Orange’.

Then there was the case of a teenage girl gang from East London, calling itself Girls Over Men, which decided to punish a 16-year-old girl for disrespecting the gang leader’s mother.

Several of its members abducted the girl at knifepoint and took her to an alley, where they slashed the clothes from her body. One whipped her with a belt while another took photos on a mobile phone.

Jailing these girls, Judge William Kennedy said the attack was ‘ferocious, deliberate and chilling’.
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Numerous studies both here and in the U.S. have shown that a sense of abandonment after a divorce or separation can stunt girls emotionally. Without a father’s love and attention, and a sense that they’re valued, young girls tend not to thrive.

They’re more likely to have sex earlier, to become single mothers and to fail to form or maintain relationships. From a young age, they’ll aggressively seek attention from men. As one study poignantly put it, they are ‘clumsily erotic’.

The explosion in single mothers means that far more girls than before are growing up without a father.

Four out of ten children born in 2000 to single mothers had no contact at all with their fathers by 2003.

This means we’re going to see increasing numbers of these fatherless girls joining gangs and becoming violent.'