However, according to Australian Institute of Criminology figures covering Victoria, Queensland and South Australia, overall female offending rates increased only for assault between 1995 and 2006. The rate rose 40% for women, compared with 15% for male offenders. Nationally, the imprisonment rate for women soared between 1984 and 2003, by 209% for women compared with 75% for men. So what's going on? Are women really becoming more violent?

While these figures point to a disturbing trend, those searching for the reasons behind it paint a complex picture of women's changing identities, and an apparent acceptance of an increasingly violent culture. With traditional male and female roles under constant pressure, young women have been alternately admired and derided for their independence, risk-taking and showing a more aggressive side. At the same time, their lives have changed in other significant ways. Women now marry later (if at all), delay childbirth, enjoy their independent incomes and often play hard. Women are now more likely than ever to have a voice in business, government and relationships. Popular culture carries the momentum, bringing feisty women to our television screens: Buffy, Roseanne, and Seinfeld's Elaine. And it has also brought images that didn't spare our sensitivities.

"I grew up taking in a lot of violence by watching news and current affairs on the ABC, and I believe I had a readiness to respond to this far more than my mother or grandmother had," says University of Melbourne academic and author Liz Conor. "Because of that indoctrination of violence, I came away thinking the world was a dangerous place." The current generation of women may be less shocked by images of violence than previous generations, she says. "And young women witness the lack of redress of violence, particularly in football when the tribunals don't act. You have to ask, too, about violent video games like Grand Theft Auto. This is where they're allowed to act out their frustrations about being young."

Conor views female identity as inexorably shifting from discreet and self-effacing to assertive, with war service and the feminist revolution forming high-water marks. "Discreet is Edwardian, dainty was 1920s and interwar. Later, during wartime, women were involved in heavy work, and were also heroic and effective in espionage. They had physical endurance and skills that we've seen transfer to the sports field. "Then feminism came along to say we were no longer to be dainty or fragile. This identity went out the window, it was wiped." In alcohol consumption, too, women have taken to riskier behaviour. As the Rudd Government recently noted, women have caught up with men in terms of regular heavy drinking.

But the evidence of women taking on more "male" forms of crime, and the potential links between drinking and violence, are complex. "Women populate public space now more than they once did, often in the company of men, and it would be interesting to track where violent incidents occur," says Dr Sue Davies, a senior criminology lecturer at La Trobe University.

Few jobs, sports and leisure activities remain inaccessible to women, and as well as rubbing shoulders with men, they can be rubbed up the wrong way. "The violence may well be happening in and around social venues where women drink and might get involved in violence with men," says Davies. Criminologists and prisoner advocates emphasise there are many contributing factors to women's violence, including drug dependence and the influence of childhood abuse and family neglect. Many academic papers have also been devoted to women's treatment by police and the courts, and sentencing patterns. In Australian Institute of Criminology data, the most common reasons female offenders gave for committing serious offences were: "I was drunk or high"; and "I lost my temper". Others included payback, seeking money for drugs, peer pressure, or for kicks.

"Girls these days are using speed and ice, destructive drugs that will intensify people's behaviour," says Davies. "There is no doubt drugs are a major part of female offending. But in crime statistics, drugs often get obscured when there's a more serious charge. If someone runs in waving a syringe, it's an armed robbery. The robbery may be recorded, but not the drug connection." In Conor's view, feminists in the 1980s and '90s failed to be alert to women's drug and alcohol use, and violent behaviour. "We said it's nonsense, it's patriarchal, and that men consolidated power through violence. That was our political protest. We needed then, and we need now, to pay attention to alcohol and drug use among young women, too, particularly ice."

Professor George Patton, of Melbourne's Centre for Adolescent Health, has observed how young women over time "catch up" with men, particularly in recreational drug and alcohol use. "The best example is tobacco use. For a long time we thought it was something boys came to earlier and used more heavily and longer. By the early 1990s, we'd seen an equalisation in the tobacco use rates, with girls even sneaking ahead. We've seen similar trends with cannabis use, and with drinking. In a couple of decades, girls have caught up to the boys." He believes many factors have influenced the catch-up, including affluence and the marketing of alcohol products, particularly during puberty when "kids are acutely attuned to what their peers are doing and what they believe their peers are doing, and are acutely attuned to what they see in the media".

Hence the Rudd Government targeting brightly coloured "alcopops" with its dramatic tax hike. The organisation ARBIAS (Alcohol Related Brain Injury Australian Services) warns that a whole generation of young women may suffer the harmful effects of alcohol within 10 years. Alarming statistics reveal that girls aged 12 to 15 are more than three times as likely as teenage boys of the same age to consume alcohol at least once a week.

Women are more susceptible than men to alcohol's effects. But apart from the physical price they pay for big nights out, women also labour under lingering cultural prejudices about acceptable feminine behaviour. Drunk women and violent women tend to attract attention - when Amy Winehouse walks into a lamppost, a photographer is usually on hand to capture her humiliation. "Back in the '50s and '60s, women who did drink were linked with promiscuity, and I think that still carries over into a link with sexual risk-taking," says Dr Jo Lindsay, a Monash University sociologist who has researched Melbourne's club and pub culture. "That's been glamourised in shows like Sex and the City, and there's been more openness for women, but there's a negative side too." The days of a modest sherry are long gone for many women. "Drinking habits are linked to gender, and we have seen a big shift. Alcohol is central to everyday life in Australia and an important part of being an adult. If you're a non-drinker now, it's very hard to participate socially."

It wasn't always so. In the 1950s and '60s, when the public bar was off-limits to females, women accepted a kind of social apartheid built on the high moral ground. Most women traditionally played a supporting role for men, which included limiting men's consumption of alcohol, says Lindsay. "They had to manage the drinking too, in terms of its impact on domestic violence and sexual assault, so drinking has been a dangerous thing for women in the past," she says. "Clearly there's been a big change that goes along with second-wave feminism. Nightlife has been feminised and so has drinking. Women see it as their right to enjoy nightlife just as men do, and it's become an important part of work life to go out drinking. Also, the youth stage is so stretched out, with women having children later. It's not just the two years between high school and then motherhood, now young people have a lot more time to drink."

The downside, she says, is the compulsory drinking with peers that men have always been subject to. "You can't really get away with your one shandy." Patton believes the perception of women drinkers as unfeminine has faded. "Alcohol and drug use is very much part of the lifestyle of celebrity role models that girls look to, and I think that's contributed to the social sanctions against drinking diminishing." But are they? Feminist criminologists are quick to warn that women are often judged more harshly than men for seemingly inappropriate behaviour. "If women behave aggressively, it's more quickly pathologised as not being feminine enough," says University of Melbourne criminology researcher Antonia Quadara.

"If binge-drinking is seen as aping male behaviour, it's still seen as more problematic for women than it is for men. There's an association of women as uncontrollable. When they step outside rigid stereotypes of what's acceptable, they're seen as behaving worse than men." Conor believes perceptions of drunk or violent women are governed by "a class reading, rather than a gender one; they are seen as trash".

Victoria Police inspector Paul Ross insists that, on Melbourne's nightlife streets, women and men are treated equally when drunk or violent. Despite the statistics, he hasn't witnessed any great change in rates of female offending in the inner city. In his experience, drunk women are more at risk of being victims of violence or sexual assault, than perpetrators. "Becoming inebriated puts women in a high-risk category, particularly late at night, and they should be mindful of that." Lindsay also takes a moderate view. She doesn't believe, on the whole, that Australian women are violent, and says it's often overlooked that many women do drink just a little. In her view, there's no need for "moral panic" about young women's drinking and subsequent behaviour.

"I don't think we're like Britain, where the 'ladette' stuff is really strong. I was in Manchester a few years ago, and it was St Patrick's Day and there was mayhem on the streets. Women were throwing things, getting arrested, screaming. I don't think we see that here. "For men, drinking is often a licence to be aggressive. Women in Australia just don't do that, we're not like football players who glass their girlfriend."

Even at the Melbourne Cup, when they're sitting ducks for press photographers, women are more messy than menacing. "They're just hilariously toppling on their heels, or having a wee in the car park. They're hardly a public danger!" says Lindsay.