by Shari Graydon
Homemakers Magazine, Mar. 1999
Republished with permission

Dressed in a baggy T-shirt, cotton pants and runners, her long, wavy hair gelled and falling around her shoulders, she looks like an ordinary teenager. The stories she tells me about being spoiled as child, rebelling as a young teen against her mom and hanging out at the mall with her friends sound like pretty common teenage experiences.

About life in the detention centre, she says, "It's not so bad; I already knew lots of the kids."

Yet she spent her "Sweet 16" birthday behind bars, locked up in one of British Columbia's closed custody units for youth. "Janice" (the Young Offenders Act prohibits publication of her real name) is in jail for her part in the brutal murder of 14-year-old Reena Virk in November, 1997, an event that stunned the nation and prompted "Bad Girl" headlines coast to coast. About life in the detention centre, she says, "It's not so bad; I already knew lots of the kids."

The vicious attack leading to Virk's murder by a group of teenagers in a middle-class suburb of Victoria wasn't the first such incident to make headlines. In recent years stories of teen violence -- usually involving testosterone-pumped boys carried away by their won misplaced machismo - have disturbed us all.

What made Reena Virk's case so shocking was that seven out of eight of the kids who participated in butting out a cigarette on her forehead, and punching and kicking her until she dazed and bleeding, were girls. And one of them is alleged to have returned to the scene of the initial attack with a male friend, battered Virk unconscious and thrown her in the river, where she drowned, her body discovered a week later.

In the wake of burgeoning news reports about girl-to-girl violence, the case galvanized growing concerns across the country about just what young women are up to these days. The answer appears to be "No good." Statistics Canada reported in July that while the overall crime rate fell for the sixth consecutive year, it escalated among teenage girls by five per cent. The big picture seems to be even more alarming: from 1987 to 1997 the number of young women charged with violent crime grew from about 900 to 4800, a staggering five-fold increase and twice that of same-aged boys.

Despite these figures and sensational Bad Girl headlines, the jury's still out on how widespread the problem is. For one thing, the actual numbers are relatively small: 1997's five per cent increase brought the rate to 472 offenses per 100,000 population. That compares with 1,328 per 100, 000 among male offenders, which represents a four per cent drop from the previous year. For another, two-thirds of those charges were for minor assault, involving hitting or shoving that didn't result in bodily harm. The aggravated assault charges laid against the girls who attacked Reena Virk represented less than one per cent of the violent offense charges in that year.

"Zero tolerance" policies increasingly popular

Experts also point out that the numbers have risen because more charges are being laid. Alan Markwart, director of the Youth Justice team with the B.C. Ministry for Children and Families, attributes this in part ot the "zero tolerance" policies now popular in schools struggling to deal with student violence. "Cases formerly dealt with by school principals are now more likely to result in legal charges," he says. He also speculates that police may be less inclined today to dismiss physical aggression between two girls as merely a "cat fight." Instead, they've begun to apply to girls the same standards used to determine the seriousness of crimes committed by boys.

"Sugar and spice" cultural stereotypes are dying hard.

Mitigating factors notwithstanding, criminologists and youth workers say that teenage girls are much more likely these days to express their anger over trivial things - and in increasingly physical ways. Once-persistent "sugar and spice" cultural stereotypes are dying hard as researchers point to evidence showing that girls have always felt just as much anger as boys; they've just been encouraged to channel their aggression in to more socially acceptable "feminine" behaviors - like gossiping, name-callling and excluding the kids they want to punish.

That girls are now expressing their anger physically is largely a sign of the times, attributable to the growing acceptance of violence in the teenage subculture. Studies have shown that exposure to violence can lead to increased violent behavior on the part of girls, desensitizing them to the point where they no longer feel emotional distress.

But the attack on Reena Virk was so frenzied - the girl's skull was fractured, her back broken - the issue takes on confounding proportions. How can young girls be capable of such shocking cruelty? What's going on in their heads?

Prying answers out of Janice isn't easy. Throughout our conversation, she is distracted by the comings and goings of people on the other side of the Plexiglas wall. At one point she interrupts herself to declare with pride, "That was my boyfriend who just walked by."

When I ask her about the night that Reena Virk died, I can tell that she doesn't really want to think - let alone talk - about what happened. But she does tell me that the source of the conflict was her belief that Virk had spread rumors about her and messed around with her boyfriend.

She says that the testimony and new stories describing her and a friend as "luring" Reena Virk to the site of a planned attack were false. "Fights happen every day," she says. "It just got out of hand."

"You want to look big in front of your friends"

Judging by the experiences of Stacey and Camille (pseudonyms), the Vancouver-area girls who have been on both the delivery and receiving ends of teen violence, the circumstances leading to Reena Virk's death were chillingly common. Rumors, jealousy, competition over boyfriends, they say, are the issues most likely to ignite a fight among teenage girls. As to why more and more of those fights seem to be escalating into physical aggression, Stacey says: "You want to look big in front of your friends, to have a "Don't mess with me" attitude. And if someone goes after you, you can't just sit there and take it."

Dr. Sibylle Artz, director of the School of Child and Youth Care at the University of Victoria, has authored one of the few studies of violence among teenage girls. Her book, Sex, Power and the Violent School Girl (Trifolium Books, 1998), provides insights into the profile of the "typical" violent teenage girl.

Violent girls often emerge from home lives in which they've been physically, sexually and/or emotionally abused, experienced significant alienation from at least one parent and observed chronic drug or alcohol misuse.

Not surprisingly, staying focused in school and fitting in generally are often a challenge for these kids, who quickly gravitate towards other teenagers with similar backgrounds. The subculture that develops reflects the same kinds of conflict and substance abuse that they see at home. And belonging to the rebel group becomes a desperate survival issue.

As Camille sees it, "If you're not getting attention at home, your friends - and belonging - are really important. You basically do whatever's necessary to get talked about" - including violence - "because attention, even if it's negative, is better than nothing."

This sounds perverse to most adults - and indeed, to most teenagers. But for the kids involved, says Shawn McNabb, a Youth Services worker in Burnaby, B.C., "Social interaction built around a constant battle for dominance is often consistent with what they experience at home."

There's an expectation that girls, like boys, will demonstate their worth in the gang by "beating up someone who has called you down."

The rites of passage required for acceptance into the tough crowd still include the traditional sources of peer pressure: smoking, drinking, taking drugs. Stacey explains that these are now accompanied by the expectation that girls, like boys, will demonstrate their worth in the gang by "beating up someone who has called you down." The ethic of revenge is often accompanied by the assumption that the victims "deserve" their treatment. Camille describes the coveted male attention won by "defending your rep" with fists and feet: "You get talked about and you get respect."

Some experts have suggested that girls are becoming more violent because they want to be more like boys, leading to speculation that feminism factors into the issue. By encouraging young women to seize power and go after what they want, the theory goes, we've created a monster - transforming girls into aggressive, insensitive takers.

Reality tells a different story. Youth workers say that girls who use violence as a means of resolving conflict typically have much more emotional investment in the traditional female goals of getting married and having a family than pursuing independence and a career. They are also more prone to seek validation through men than compete with them. The icons of popular culture - from the bikini-clad "warrior babes" to the ubiquitous Spice Girls - reinforce this notion. Although lip service is paid to female power, the images of women predominating in the media send overwhelmingly sexist and misogynist messages, says Dr. Artz, teaching that "females are inferior to males and, in the last analysis, sexual objects."

Dr. Artz believes that understanding this dynamic is crucial to resolving violence among teenage girls. "The extent to which girls from troubled homes buy into messages about women's inferiority and see status as something to be gained through male attention supports their inclination to judge each other harshly."

Get-tough approaches won't solve youth crime

Most experts agree that solutions do not include tightening up the Young Offenders Act. "The research is pretty clear," says Alan Markwart: "Get-tough approaches won't solve youth crime." Instead, training and education are paramount. Markwart stresses the importance of identifying kids in troubled homes at a young age. Then, he says, "there are two components: strong support for and training of parents, and enhanced early education to encourage kids' success in school."

Violence-prevention programs in the schools are useful too, says Dr. Artz, as long as they're geared to those they're intended to help. An anti-violence initiative she and project partner Dr. Ted Riecken, acting associate dean of education at the University of Victoria, introduced into B.C.'s Sooke school district underscores the need for gender-specific training programs.

This particular program, whose initiatives range from installing playground equipment to "bully-proofing" courses involving role-playing, was prompted by a University of Victoria 1993 survey of 1,500 grade 8 to 10 students, which revealed that 51 percent of boys and 21 per cent of girls had admitted to beating up another person in the previous year. A sampling of the same age group taken last spring, five years into the project, showed a decrease in physical aggression of over 20 per cent among males and of 50 per cent among females. "Girls are clearly more ready to respond to this type of program," says Dr. Artz. Adds Dr. Riecken, "Girls respond to programs that focus on social skills training and desire to build positive relationships."

Angst among teenage girls is often provoked by the difficulty in forming trusting relationships with peers. When this is compounded by parental neglect and feelings of worthlessness - especially in the context of society's profoundly contradictory messages about female power, the importance of male attention and acceptable sexual behavior for women - the situation is ripe for violent behavior.

Violence begets violence. It also creates victims, who could be our daughters. If the price Reena Virk paid with her life has any meaning at all, it has at least sounded a wake-up call to the pressing need for more research into the real lives of teenage girls today.