She looks innocent and has a respectable job - but Holly is one of a generation of women for whom drunken violence is just part of a night out

For Yvonne Cole, the night began no differently from any other. A new dress to show off to her girlfriends, a few drinks as they got ready at home and then off to the local nightclub for a bit of dancing and harmless fun.



That was the idea. Instead, the night would end in a very different way - a way that a generation ago would have been unheard of, but which today is only too common.



Trying to calm down a petty argument between a friend and another young woman, 19-year-old Yvonne suddenly found herself lying on the floor, blood streaming from a wound to her head.

Self-confessed ladette: Holly Clements looks like butter wouldn't melt, left, but on nights out fuelled by binge drinking she's turned rowdy and violent

A glass had been smashed into her face by her drunk, female assailant, narrowly missing her right eye but leaving a two-inch cut deep into her forehead and knocking her out at the same time.

'I didn't expect it,' recalls Yvonne, a part-time model and student nurse from Taunton, Somerset. 'This girl just exploded out of nothing and slammed the glass into my face.'



In some respects, Yvonne was lucky. Because of a previous glassing in the club in which a young man lost an eye, the glass she was attacked with was made from reinforced plastic and did not shatter.



But even so, when she looked at herself in the mirror after being admitted to hospital, she knew her dreams of being a model were over before they had really begun.

'I was shocked at my reflection - the cut was deep and has left a scar that will probably never fade,' she says.



Deeply upset, Yvonne was determined to press charges against her attacker. But it became apparent that was not going to happen. The police told her the young woman denied the attack, claiming the glass had slipped out of her hand.



She was issued with a caution, a slap on the wrist, and allowed to go on her way. 'I was surprised,' said Yvonne.

Night out: Holly said binge-drinking is the norm for her and her friends

'The police didn't seem to be too bothered about it. I didn't think girls were involved in this sort of thing so thought it would be taken really seriously. But maybe the police are used to it, maybe it happens all the time.'



Sad to say, that isn't far from the truth. Shocking figures reveal women are being convicted of violent crimes at the rate of more than 200 every week - an increase of 81 per cent since Labour came to power.



Murders have more than doubled, life-threatening woundings are up by a fifth and common assault has soared by 151 per cent



More often than not, the violence is fuelled by alcohol as women make the most of 24-hour drinking and emulate the worst behaviour of men.

And, as the Mail reported this week, the number of so-called 'stranger assaults' in Binge Britain is soaring - partly thanks to attacks carried by foulmouthed, inebriated and violent ladettes.



'There has been a real and unacceptable rise in the number of offences committed by young women,' says Paul McKeever, chairman of the Police Federation, the body which represents rankand- file police officers.



'As teenagers we used to sit on the swings swigging cider'

'The culture has changed in the past ten or 15 years and drink is a major factor. In the past, people might have gone away on holiday and while there consumed large quantities of alcohol, but when they came back home would return to a more conservative way of drinking.

'Now it is almost holiday-drinking 52 weeks a year. Whereas in the past if there was an altercation in a pub or club women would have been in the background, that is simply not the case any more.



'Today there is almost no shame involved in being drunk and out of control - it is almost seen as a vital part of a good night out.'



If proof of Mr McKeever's observations were needed, then the news over the past two weeks provides a choice array of evidence.



First up is the unforgettable image of a young woman out celebrating in Cardiff which the Daily Mail published a few days ago.



Her hair carefully piled on to her head and her little black dress set off by a shimmering necklace, it is clear from the photograph that she has taken time with her appearance before going out.



But her behaviour is anything but demure. Flanked by a laughing posse of female friends, she is caught on camera shrieking at the top of her voice, staggering down the middle of a road, arms raised above her head - and with a pair of knickers around her ankles. No shame, there, it seems.

But at least (and that's assuming the young woman didn't subsequently trip and fall) no one was physically hurt by that very public display of lewd behaviour.



Unfortunately, the same could not be said of another incident which involved five women, aged between 21 and 42, who were each jailed for six months recently for attacking a man in Grimsby town centre.

The incident was captured on CCTV and showed Matthew Campbell, 38, being punched to the pavement where he was then kicked and hit in a ferocious assault that lasted a full eight minutes.



His assailants, all members of the same extended family, had been drinking heavily.



To his credit, Mr Campbell restrained himself from hitting back - on the basis that no man should ever be violent towards a woman. He now knows such chivalry is

The number of women fined for being drunk and disorderly in public has risen by nearly a third in three years

redundant in 21st-century Britain.

'Women like this are no strangers to mindless violence,' Mr Campbell observed following the court case.



'Drink is just a fuel. They don't go out to enjoy themselves, they go out to cause as much mayhem as possible.'

Don't believe it? Consider what the youngest of his assailants, Katie Tomlinson, wrote on her profile page on social networking site Bebo: 'Happiest when im all stella'd up n partyin.'



Evidence that more women are drinking to excess and then behaving badly is backed up by statistics.



One study, for example, showed the number of women fined for being drunk and disorderly in public has risen by nearly a third in three years. The figures are up from 6,098 in 2005 to 7,930 in 2007 - a sharper increase than that seen in men.

The biggest rise of all was seen among young women. The number of girls aged between 16 and 17 who were fined increased by 47 per cent, from 438 to 642.



So what is going on? Dr Kate O'Brien, a criminologist at the University of Kent, says: 'First, until the early Nineties, women found drunk in town and city centres weren't dealt with in the same way as they are today.

Alcohol-driven scrapes: Holly once attacked another woman in a bar when she was drunk

'There has been a big change in the way we perceive drunk and disorderly women, and police officers today are much more likely to arrest and charge a woman who is drunk on the street.



'In the past, a more welfare-based approach meant that young women being drunk in public spaces were likely to be treated with care and their safety considered.



'As a result of this new approach, the increase in recorded violent crime makes it look as though women are getting much more violent, but in fact it shows that the police are much more likely to use certain powers to criminalise young women.'



Dr O'Brien believes the opportunities for women to drink have increased. Pub and club operators market themselves to young women, using female-friendly interiors and drink promotions.



Also, she says, because women are delaying having children and because many more are in post-16 education, they are more likely to go out to drink in pubs and clubs.



'The taboos about women drinking in public spaces have reduced,' says Dr O'Brien. 'In the past, if we saw a young, drunken disorderly woman in the street, we would have been quite shocked, thinking: "That is not what young women do."



'Today, we are so used to seeing women behaving this way that we expect it.'



At the same time, many argue there has been a cultural shift, whereby female drunkenness is seen as a badge of honour.



There has been a cultural shift, whereby female drunkenness is seen as a badge of honour

A quick search of social networking sites such as Facebook reveals a plethora of groups dedicated to showcasing photographs of the drunken antics of young women - unconscious, vomiting, urinating or exposing themselves to the camera.



Incredibly, the pictures are often submitted by the women in the pictures.



Dr David Green, director of the Civitas think-tank, says: 'There has been a trend among a minority of young females to become more like men, and the roles they have chosen to emulate are the worst men. Add to that the drinking, and that adds up to more violence.'



It is something that solicitor's receptionist Holly Clements is well aware of. At the age of 24, she has been involved in more alcohol-driven scrapes than she can remember.



But given that she started drinking at the age of ten, perhaps that is hardly surprising.



Having started off by sampling the spirits in her parents' drinks cabinet, by the time Holly arrived at secondary school she and a group of friends had progressed to being regular drinkers.

'We used to sit on the swings swigging cider,' says Holly, whose mother Denise is a civil servant and dad Tony a London taxi driver.

Strain on resources: The emergency services are having to deal with more and more incidents relating to women binge-drinking

'I would spend my dinner money on drink and, because my parents were both at work when I came home from school, they never guessed what I was up to.



'Among my contemporaries, binge-drinking is the norm,' she says.



'All the clubs offer free entry for women. These days, it is hard to go out and not have a drink.'

And when Holly has a drink, it often ends in trouble. On one occasion, she was thrown out of a nightclub by bouncers for yelling obscenities at them. On another, she was so drunk that she tripped and fell over a paving slab, injuring her face so badly that she had to go to hospital for treatment.



That incident served as a wake-up call for Holly who, by then, was drinking so much that she had put on a stone in weight.



Determined to turn her life around, last year she appeared on TV reality show Ladette To Lady, in which young women who have gone off the rails are coached to behave more appropriately.



Following the series, a seemingly reformed Holly was delighted to land a job with a legal firm.



But despite being given a second chance, it's not all been plain sailing. On holiday in Barbados last month, she was drinking again and ended up in a violent altercation with another British woman.



A fight broke out and (although Holly claims she was acting in self-defence) the other woman ended up needing hospital treatment for a cut to the face from a broken glass.



Holly was arrested on a wounding charge and fined £459.



'I hadn't even had much to drink and because it happened so fast, I can hardly remember what happened or what it was about. Since then, I've drunk even less.



'It brought home how dangerous excessive drinking is. I am sure that had I not had any alcohol, I would have seen the trouble coming and walked away sooner. But what happened to me is just a normal occurrence in almost every pub and nightclub any night of the week.'



That this is indeed the case is highlighted by research carried out in nightclubs in Glasgow.



It’s a fact The number of women found guilty of murder, vicious assault and other attacks has risen by 81 per cent since 1998

It discovered that women were responsible for 37 per cent of violent attacks in the clubs surveyed, shattering the belief that it is almost always men who are behind such trouble.

Of those women involved in fights, 40 per cent of female attackers pulled their victims' hair, 30 per cent punched and slapped them and 10 per cent kicked and slapped their adversaries.

The researchers were on hand to witness the fights and noted that the level of violence involving women was comparable with fights between men. In 30 per cent of female cases, the victim was injured.



In fights between men, the proportion was 34 per cent. Among the female assailants witnessed by researchers was an 'extremely vicious' woman in her early 20s who battered her victim with a stiletto heel.



In another incident, a baying mob of 18-year-old females cornered a girl in a toilet cubicle and one of them shouted: 'I know you're in there. Just wait until you come out.'



The study observed that security staff in nightclubs, who are generally men, often appeared reluctant to intervene in fights involving women.



This allowed the women to get more out of control than men. 'The findings of this research were unexpected, as previous research of this nature has tended to find that aggressive behaviour in bars is a predominantly, or even exclusively, male activity,' the study concludes.



'Female nightclub patrons' aggression seems to be as severe as that of their male counterparts and also occurring at a similar frequency.'



It is something that Yvonne Cole has learned, to her cost, at the age of 19. And it is something she will be reminded of every time she looks in the mirror.



