ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH
Thursday, Apr. 17 2008

Fight-club culture glamorizes girl-on-girl violence
By Colleen Carroll Campbell

Even after the video went viral on the Internet and cable news networks, the
images that surfaced last week from Lakeland, Fla., retained their shock value.
The homemade, half-hour film showed a gaggle of teenage girls cornering and
pummeling another girl with repeated punches, slaps and kicks as she curled
into a fetal position and tried to shield her face from their blows.

The motives for the beating were maddeningly mundane. Police say the victim was
targeted for "trash talking" the other girls on her MySpace webpage. They
orchestrated a beating and recorded it because they wanted to exact revenge and
become famous in the process. They got their wish on both counts: The victim, a
16-year-old cheerleader, was left with a concussion, two black eyes and partial
hearing and vision loss. Meanwhile, her attackers made national headlines and
one even had her bail posted by a staff member of the "Dr. Phil" show, which
wanted dibs on an exclusive interview.

Predatory talk-show hosts salivate over such sensationalistic stories, which
combine Internet-age exhibitionism with shocking acts of female aggression.
Unfortunately, such stories of girl-on-girl violence are not as novel as they
once were.

In 2003, a group of senior girls at Glenbrook North High School in Northbrook,
Ill., made international headlines with the video of a vicious hazing of a
group of the school's junior girls, a hazing that involved kicking and beating
the juniors and pelting them with paint, urine, feces and animal guts. Just
last year, three ninth-grade girls at Long Island's North Babylon High School
achieved similar notoriety after posting online a video of their violent group
assault on a 13-year-old girl.

Any woman who has survived junior high knows that such subtle forms of female
aggression as clique-forming and gossip-mongering are nothing new. Yet the rise
in high-profile cases of criminal violence among teenage girls, and the star
treatment the perpetrators receive for their crimes, is alarming.

Consider the ubiquity of female fight videos, which litter such catch-all
websites as YouTube and MySpace and dozens of websites devoted exclusively to
showcasing footage of female aggression. Add to these online images the violent
television scenes children see — one frequently cited study estimates that the
average 18-year-old has seen about 200,000 violent acts on television — and it
is not surprising that we see real-life imitations of this violence by girls as
well as boys.

According to psychologist James Garbarino, author of "See Jane Hit: Why Girls
Are Growing More Violent and What We Can Do About It," studies once showed a
stronger link between the viewing of violence and violent behavior in boys than
in girls. But new research suggests that girls increasingly are affected by
violent images they absorb, Garbarino says, and that spells trouble for girls
who already feel pressured by our hyper-sexualized culture to compete for male
attention in extreme ways — including by imitating the worst excesses of male
aggression.

In a culture that equates "girl power" with self-centered belligerence and
confuses notoriety with fame, a culture in which woman-on-woman fights make
ratings gold and disgraced figure skater Tonya Harding can parlay her
reputation for cutthroat competitiveness into a splashy new career as a
celebrity boxer, it makes sense that girls would see female violence as
glamorous.

Perhaps girls need more reminders that the compassion, moral sensitivity and
care for the weak traditionally associated with femininity are virtues that
still deserve cultivation, even in a society that gives them short shrift. Any
form of women's liberation that convinces girls to reject these virtues lest
they appear weak and encourages them to cultivate cruelty to win male attention
is not worthy of the name.

Colleen Carroll Campbell is an author, television and radio host, and St.
Louis-based fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. Her website is
www.colleen-campbell.com.