Not to go on about it, not that that ever stopped the Daily Mail…but we’re back with another round of violent girls, that’s the real problem in society today.
Harriet Sergeant seems to have taken last months round of trying to make a fall in female crime look like a big rise, to write a trend piece about how falling crime by girls is leading to the rise of a “new breed of young women every bit as alienated, violent and brutally sexualised as the worst male yob”.
Because the Daily Mail is like opposite land.
First the dodgy stats, I have no idea where these come from, it doesn’t say, the only stats I can find that might fit are for the three years to 2008, so it’s that or they are totally made up
A reference in the next par to latest followed by 2008 suggest the former, meaning it’s a three year old reheated article or statistics that back up the message have been dragged from the archives. Either way not really reflecting current reality.
Anyway, those statistics…
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.
Nope, according to the Youth Justice Board, offences by girls aged 10 to 17 fell by 24.7% between 2007/08 and 2009/10.
Violence against the person offences by girls fell 26.9% over the same period.
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.
Quick check of those statistics (Home Office – Crime in England and Wales (pdf)) – yes, we have gone back in time four years to 2007/08 to a time when women were the offender in 13% of violent incidents or were involved alongside men in 11% of incidents.
In 2009/10, you know the actual latest figures, men were the offender in 84% of violent incidents, women in 9% and both in 7%.
Young women are not becoming more violent!
Except for in the reality of the Daily Mail and its statistics-ignorant journalists who are desperate to show against all contrary evidence that there is a wave of unfeminine violent girls destroying the country.
Which leads us to the real problem for the Mail:
Yet society remains preoccupied by male crime.
Given it’s the bigger problem, what with them committing 84% of violent offences, I can totally understand why society is slightly more concerned with it, yes.
Though, to be fair, crime by young males is falling as well by similar levels and crime generally is going down.
However, lets get to an actual problem, though obviously one that is all the fault of the “bad girls” anyway.
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.
Anyone reading that as a ‘well if they didn’t get involved with gang culture and were good girls then they wouldn’t have been raped?’.
Now sexual offences are overwhelmingly committed by men, 97.8% for dealt with offences committed by young people, and in the case of young men, it, unlike almost all other offences, is not falling.
So if the Daily Mail wants to investigate a problem in modern Britain, it might to look at why, if crime generally is falling, are sexual offences are on the rise?
Though that might not fit with its women who claim to have been raped are liars or deserved it line.