Watching girls behave brutally

The triple-teamed teen was catching hell in that video, taped by cell phone and circulated over the Web from little Babylon Town. A triple-teamed teen writhing on the ground, defenselessly. She was being kicked and beaten, with three pairs of feet and fists, about her head, back, stomach, all over. Her attackers cursed her, using their faves, the B-word and the F-word.




Source Newsday

Watching girls behave brutally

Female felons have been outpacing the opposite sex in the race to end up behind bars since the mid-1990s. That's right. Women are the faster- growing population of prisoners in this country. While taking in the sick self-portrait of three teenage girls stomping another girl into the green grass of suburbia, this fact of prison life rushes to the forefront.

The triple-teamed teen was catching hell in that video, taped by cell phone and circulated over the Web from little Babylon Town. A triple-teamed teen writhing on the ground, defenselessly. She was being kicked and beaten, with three pairs of feet and fists, about her head, back, stomach, all over. Her attackers cursed her, using their faves, the B-word and the F-word.

More than the grist for run-of-the-mill crime stories, this true tale cannot and should not be overlooked. For its audacity, its pettiness and daring, the fact that the offenders are so young and already this brutal. The attackers are complaining vaguely in that video about how the attacked girl had messed over their Chinese food - go figure - though this fight was later said to be a dispute over a boy who had dated one of the attackers and the attacked.

Putting this madness on camera, I suppose, becomes their few seconds of fame. The girls had an acquaintance record them in the throes of the crime and use the footage to attract an Internet audience. Chalk that up to youth? Dumb, brawling kids have always been with us. Well, yes, and that's the cop-out, a big part of the problem. Police said the assaulted child's parents had to be persuaded to press charges. Only they know why. Would fighting back in the courts mean more trouble for their stricken girl? This is the sort of thing that blows over?

No need to pick on those parents. They and their daughter are in a tight spot. She didn't deserve that beating, neither the pounding to her flesh nor her emotions.

I was involved in my own fisticuffs as a kid, though they pale in comparison to the Babylon beat-down. Mainly, I got into it with neighborhood boys annoyed that I wanted to hang around and build hot rods with them. We pushed and shoved, threw a punch or two. My slightly older brother would order me to go home. Girls were not allowed.

But this was far from the vivid brutality caught on camera and resulting in last week's arrest of a trio of 13- and 14-year-olds. A friend of mine who teaches school in Texas swears kids are different these days, that there's a heightened social pressure to prove just how bad a kid can be. My friend, Yvonne Ndubuisi, once got slapped by a student in the middle of class. "I slapped her back, walked her to the principal's office and told the principal that I love teaching and I love kids, but they cannot slap me." Four years prior, my friend was out of the classroom on disability for six months after a student pushed her down a flight of stairs.

Yvonne lays this sort of random craziness by kids largely at the feet of parents who are not up to snuff and probably never should have had a kid (though, of course, some kids get the best parents and parenting but still go buck wild). What was captured on a cell phone, three battering girls, is a convergence of several things. What happens in a girl's home before she is unleashed on the world outside? What do her parents teach about honor, public decorum and following a reasonable set of rules and expectations?

Being able to out-cuss a classmate, giving them a good beat-down, being the baaaddest, most crass and disrespecting kid on a campus or a playground or the LIRR conveys status in certain circles. Many of those who land in prison started up that road when they were mere juveniles.

Several years ago at a Hofstra University conference about women and what sometimes makes us powerful and what detracts from that strength, former Ms. magazine editor Marcia Ann Gillespie, a Long Island girl herself, discussed the heartache of watching women line up for weekend bus rides to see their men in prison. Anybody can live a life that leads them to jail, Gillespie said. What takes real courage is doing what it takes not to end up there.

In light of the prison stats, this message merits being repeated early and often. To bad boys and girls alike.