Bad girls: An investigation into a new breed of young women every bit as alienated, violent and brutally sexualised as the worst male yob



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.

Violence: According to the latest Government statistics, one in four violent attacks now involves a female

She was discussing the proposed drugs deal with crisp efficiency when a boy of about 14 drove past on a motorbike. Suddenly, his head snapped back to look at us.

He’d clearly heard my companion’s raised voice as he haggled over the price of the drugs.

The boy immediately pulled his bike round and started revving loudly, raising his front wheel off the ground. He was still doing it as we left.

My companion explained: ‘This little girl is not working for no one. She’s the brains and the boy’s her muscle.’

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.

Empty: Many girls turn to gangs to fill the vacuum left by their fathers. (Pic posed by models)

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.

According to the latest government statistics, one in four violent attacks now involves a female. This means that, in 2008, more than half a million assaults were either carried out by women or involved a female in a gang.

In the same year, there were nearly 300 attacks a week carried out by girls under 18. Yet society remains preoccupied by male crime, and it’s still struggling to catch up with these new kids on the block.

Who thinks to warn their children to watch out for the girls? I certainly didn’t.

Then, one day after school, a female stranger walked up to my then 14-year-old daughter outside London’s Hammersmith Tube station and slapped her hard across the face, before running off laughing.

Attack: Ruby Thomas and Rachael Burke, right, whose violence was likened to ‘a scene from the film Clockwork Orange’

It was the kind of petty yobbery once associated almost solely with boys. But times have changed.

In Newcastle upon Tyne, I paid a visit to a state secondary school that reserves a special classroom for badly-behaved teenagers.

I was hoping to interview teenage boys at the time, and asked if I could go to the ‘sin bin’ to meet some.



The teacher was apologetic: that morning, every single occupant of the sin bin was a girl. Grimacing, he said: ‘They’re worse than the boys now.’ 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’. Hand in hand with violence and gang culture is the high rate of teenage pregnancy. Sadly, as this series will make clear, becoming a teenage mother or beating up a passer-by turn out to be part and parcel of the same problem. Over the past ten months, I have interviewed girls all around the country to find out what’s triggering such extreme behaviour. What was striking is that nearly every violent teenage girl I met could trace her problems back to an absent or abusive father. All reported overwhelming feelings of rage and a sense of powerlessness. And many had turned to gangs to fill the vacuum left by their fathers. Inner city: Violence by a girl is often seen by her peers as a sign of strength

Candace, a gang member on an estate in Brixton, South London, was typical. Flashily dressed in black boots, a brown leather jacket and huge gold hoop earrings, she was 18 and already the mother of a three-year-old boy.

Her father, she said, hadn’t been around when she was growing up.

‘I wouldn’t have needed to go out looking for someone if my dad had loved me,’ she said.

So she increasingly turned to her gang for support and comradeship — winning approval by giving in to their demands for sex.

‘I thought I had to be accepted, so I slept with them. When a boy wanted me, it made me feel special. Oh my gosh, it became a really big thing.’

After giving birth to one boy’s child — though ‘I smoked so much weed I thought I was going to lose my baby’ — she was thinking of putting her baby into care.

But then — in a telling example of the way these gangs become surrogate families — the leader, a boy known as Tuggy Tug who’d been in care himself, persuaded her to keep the baby. Candace then sought help from the whole gang.

‘I said to them: “I can’t do this on my own. You need to be here.” And they have been here, straight.’

When the Government’s Sure Start scheme failed to pay out the £500 all pregnant teenagers are supposed to receive, Tuggy Tug bought Candace a buggy and another member bought a cot.

As for the baby’s father, who no longer wants to know her, ‘they sorted him out and beat him up for not helping’.

Another gang member, Crystall, who’d been arrested for hiding a gun for a boyfriend, told me: ‘I do know my father, but he’s got a lot of other kids.

‘He gave me a little £20 here and there, but he was never there for me. I was desperate for anything that felt like love.’

A third, when asked why she’d joined a boy gang and become a single mother, said: ‘It’s because I needed a father to be complete.’

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.

Thuggery: Girl gangs are very similar to boy gangs - a forum for crime and violence. (Pic posed by models)

Girls need gangs for the same reasons boys do. They join them because they’re afraid — often because there’s no one else to protect them on a dangerous estate or in a poorly disciplined school.

Sky and Ebony are both 15-year-old members of a girls-only gang — a growing phenomenon.

When I met them, they were dressed almost identically in baggy jeans, heavy, metal belts and large hoop earrings, and both had their hair scraped back in ponytails.

Like Candace, Sky relies emotionally on her gang. Referring to the older members, she said: ‘The elders look after me. They give me that love and care my mum never did.’

Ebony pitched in: ‘They’re the only ones who see me as a person. Everyone else — teachers, my nan — treats me like scum.’

When Sky was harassed by an older boy, there was no question of turning to a parent for help. ‘The first person I called was my elder. She’s 18 and it’s more like I’m her little sister than her friend.’

Her elder sorted the boy out. Sky went on: ‘If I was raped, I know my gang would be there for me. They’d chase him down. I trust the gang more than I do the police to bring the person to justice.’

None of the young people I interviewed saw the adult world as there to support them. Yet both Sky and Ebony agreed that if there were adults around they could trust, they wouldn’t have to rely so much on their gang.

Despite the risks of being involved in crime, drugs and violence, Sky was adamant that she’d stay in her gang. Why? ‘Because it makes me feel wanted and protected.’

In other words, what most children expect from their parents.

Sky had joined a girl gang because of what happened to her cousin, who’d been recruited by the local boy gang.

Her cousin hid their weapons, carried their drugs and, whenever they felt like sex, dropped whatever she was doing to oblige.

At 14, her cousin agreed to take part in ‘a line-up’ — the gang term for a group of boys lining up for oral sex. But when she arrived at the house, there were eight boys rather than the three she’d expected.

She burst into tears and refused, but the boys slapped her into submission. ‘She thought she was getting respect,’ said Sky. ‘She wasn’t getting any love at home, so she thought that was love.’

Sky flicked her ponytail and sniffed. ‘Now they’re tired of sleeping with her, so she sleeps with other men for drugs and food. It’s pathetic. I don’t want to be like her.’

Many youth organisations are concerned about the rise of sexual violence towards girls in boy gangs and the way it’s accepted by even the very young. But these girls have often grown up in violent homes. To them, such treatment can seem normal.

The latest shocking figures from the British Crime Survey show that rapes of 13-year-old girls increased by 15 per cent in 2009/10.

Rapes of girls under 16 rose by 19 per cent. At the same time, sexual activity involving a child under 16 has shot up by 20 per cent.

In fact, the true figures are probably much higher, as many sexual crimes in gangs go unreported.

This brutal sexual culture is reinforced in music, as I witnessed for myself when I took three boys, all members of the same South London gang, to the Imperial War Museum a few months ago.

While we waited for one to finish admiring a Second World War tank, the other two started singing lyrics from their favourite ‘grime’ music.

‘In this neighbourhood, ugly bitches don’t get the time of day,’ rapped one. ‘I want to let out my anger,’ broke in the other, ‘yes, squeezing your breasts so hard might let out the cancer.’

When I remonstrated, they looked amazed. It hadn’t occurred to either of them that the lyrics might be offensive.

So it’s not surprising that girls like Sky and Ebony prefer to join girl gangs. Apart from the sex factor, though, they’re very similar to boy gangs — a forum for crime and violence.

‘In recent years, girls have seen the status and power given to male gang members and decided they want some of that,’ says Dr Funke Baffour, a clinical psychologist.

‘Being in a gang boosts the morale of these girls — many of whom are from broken homes without a mother or father figure.’

The girls are being lured into a life where senseless violence earns them respect. Often, they earn their membership with a random violent act, then compete for position by committing increasingly brutal crimes.

Mike Fisher, a leading anger management psychotherapist who visits inner-city schools, says that — even in the classroom — violence by a girl is often seen by her peers as a sign of strength.

‘The girls we’re dealing with in schools are increasingly physically aggressive,’ he said. ‘They’re tired of being pushed around by boys and they’re fighting back — just not in the right way.’

The charity Parentline Plus recently reported that half of its calls are from parents distressed by their daughters’ ‘extreme verbal and physical aggression’.

To find out more, I arranged to meet Dimples, the leader of a girl gang who has acquired a string of convictions.

As I waited for her outside a McDonald’s, a black girl walked past dressed in baggy jeans, trainers, a cap and heavy chains looped from her pocket to her waistband.

‘Are you Dimples?’ I asked. She looked at me as if I was mad.

‘I’m an art school student,’ she told me.

A plump, white girl in a polo neck and court shoes turned her head towards me. ‘Dimples? That’s me.’

Dimples is one of seven children, has two parents and went to a Catholic school where she did well until the age of 14, when she was arrested for assault and robbery. What happened?

‘I was very confrontational,’ she admitted over a strawberry milkshake. Her teachers wound her up, she claimed, and when she was suspended for a week, she thought: ‘You know what, let’s not bother.’

To begin with, the girls she hung around with weren’t officially a gang — but Dimples found herself acting as a gang leader when one of them was assaulted.

The victim, who’d just started at sixth-form college, had asked her friends for help. So they caught a bus to the college and tracked down the girl who’d hit their friend.

As Dimples squared up to the attacker, her friends were jeering and urging her on.

‘The main reason I hit her was to look big in front of my girls,’ she said.

‘I hit her in her head, grabbed her, got her on the floor, then punched her and stamped on her face.’

That was the first of many such episodes. Dimples explained: ‘When you’re in a gang, it’s hard to say no because you don’t want to look like an idiot. There are certain things you can’t say no to.’

With her gang of about ten teenage girls, she started ambushing professional women returning from an evening out and stealing money and jewellery.

Dimples admits she didn’t really need the money. It was the violence that attracted her, partly because it helped discharge her anger.

‘I did enjoy it. I wanted respect and it gives you this power. I knew what I was doing. I felt calm afterwards. I’d light a fag and feel, you know, really good.’

Unlike members of boy gangs, whom I’d interviewed for the Daily Mail a year before, Dimples wanted to share every detail with me.

The assault that landed her in prison was on a well-dressed girl in the street who appeared to Dimples to have glanced at her and four other gang members with disdain.

‘So I just beat her up. She tried to run. I punched her in the face. My friend held her and I punched her some more.

‘She fell to the ground in, like, a second, and me and my friend, we proper beat her up. I stamped on her. We went on punching and kicking her.’

The girl was very badly injured. Four weeks later, the police arrived at Dimples’s door.

‘I got charged with GBH. It wasn’t worth it in the end. Afterwards, I wondered why did I do it? What made me so angry? I went back and said I was sorry.’

At the time, she was revising for her GCSEs, in which she did well — ‘yet I still had time to do all this madness’. What saved her, in the end, was the attitude of other people. ‘People were afraid of me. It makes me seem like a monster — I had to change.’

At 17, Dimples has just had a baby boy. She’s studying to be an accountant and is now living at home with her parents.

‘I want my baby to grow up respecting people — otherwise you end up dying in this area,’ she said stoutly.

If she succeeds in her ambition, Dimples will be an exception. Most gang members, whatever their sex, are headed straight for a dead-end life, in which violence and drug-dealing are commonplace.

But there’s one crucial difference between the future of the girls and the boys. The teenage girls are also the mothers of the next fatherless generation.

info.harrietsergeant@gmail.com