Source: Boston Globe
September 4, 2007 Author: Maria Cramer
They use fists, knives, and razors to hurt each other. Before fights, they smear their faces with petroleum jelly so their adversaries' fingernails glide off the slick surface and won't cause scars.
Despite police statistics showing a decrease in violence among girls, teenagers, street workers, and youth advocates say girls in the city are becoming increasingly vicious when they fight in groups and assault each other. They say the girls are creating cliques that mass for safety but can be provoked into violence.
Often, they say, the violence is triggered by gossip, jealousy about a male, or a rival's looks.
"It's really petty stuff. You would be amazed at the petty stuff that stirs stuff up," said Talia Rivera, a street worker at the Boston TenPoint Coalition. "It's really similar to what the boys are doing except for the fact that they're not using guns."
Boston police said they have not noticed the trend and stress that statistics show that violent crime among girls has fallen since 2005.
Aggravated assaults by females 14 to 19 years old have declined from 112 Jan. 1 to Aug. 15, 2006, to 96 during the same period this year, according to police.
The number of girls in the custody of the Department of Youth Services as of Aug. 1 was 302, 49 fewer than the number of girls committed as of Aug. 1, 2006.
Police credit the decrease in reported crimes to the increased attention they and nonprofit organizations have paid to females at risk of becoming violent in recent years, through mentoring programs and interventions.
But some say the lower numbers may also reflect the fear and embarrassment girls feel about reporting attacks.
"I still think there is stigma around actually getting help when you need it," said Bithiah Carter, director of Community Impact at United Way. "Do I go home and hide, or worse do I fight back? There is a lot of shame there and there is a lot of fear."
Ebony Dorsey, 18, said she was walking through Franklin Park in Dorchester on an August afternoon when she spotted three young women following her. One was from her Roxbury neighborhood, someone she knew casually.
Dorsey said the woman she recognized asked her about drugs the woman had bought from a mutual acquaintance. When Dorsey told her she knew nothing of the deal, the woman snapped "whatever," backed her into a rock pile, and tried to choke her. The woman's friends kneed and punched Dorsey as she struggled to break free, Dorsey said.
Two weeks after the attack, Dorsey, who is entering her second year at Bunker Hill Community College, said she was still nursing scrapes and bruises.
The attack highlights how brutal girls become when they are in a group, youth advocates said.
"I think sometimes they do it because they can," said Jeanette Boone, acting director of the Ella J. Baker House who works closely with girls involved in violence. "When they're in a group, they've got the power."
Dorsey has returned to the park, but during her walks she is wary of everyone around her, especially women.
"I've always been the type to hang out with boys rather than girls," Dorsey said in a recent interview. "Girls do have a lot of drama. I'll just step back from that because I don't want to deal with it. This made me feel like that even more."
She said she did not report the attack to police she felt it would be a "waste of time."
"Nothing ever gets done," she said.
Gary French, a Boston police deputy superintendent in charge of the field support division, which oversees the gang unit, said girls tend to form cliques for self-preservation and protection, but his officers have not observed a violent pattern. "Sometimes the cliques come in conflict," he said. "It could just be arguing. It could be they're ignoring each other or disrespecting, to a fight between two or three girls. But we don't really see a tremendous amount of that. There is not a big problem when you look at the types of crime."
But Rivera said many fights among girls do not reach police because they are not as violent as those among males.
Girls have formed gangs and rivalries so bitter that street workers have had to intervene and create truces in the same way they have with male gangs, Rivera said. Unlike male attacks, female attacks rarely involve guns, Rivera said.
"I just think they're more reluctant to pull the trigger," she said. "Using a firearm for a female is, I think, a little bit more intense."
But some girls and young women have become vicious in other ways.
In March 2006, a 14-year-old girl received more than 100 stitches on her face after a 16-year-old girl slashed her across the face with a razor in a fight among two groups of girls.
Though such extreme brutality remains rare, slashings are becoming more common, Rivera said. There is even a name for it, "a buck fifty," where the goal is to create such a deep gash across someone's face that they will need 150 stitches.
"As we try to empower girls and make sure they feel they have the same rights as boys, and they can do what boys can do, I think what we're seeing is a 21st century girl who really feels the parity of that," Carter said. "What we're seeing is the dark side of that."
Carter said that United Way will begin a mentoring program this year with the Hyams Foundation that will focus solely on middle and high school girls who are in the custody the Department of Youth Services.
The program will try to link counselors, public health workers, and mental health specialists to determine what services the girls need as they leave DYS.
"The root cause of this is usually stress or mental anguish, and we're thinking if we can help along those lines it would help extinguish some of these issues that lead to this more violent outbreak," Carter said.
