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Fight-Club Culture Glamorizes Girl-on-Girl Violence
By Colleen Carroll Campbell
Posted: Thursday, April 17, 2008

ARTICLE
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
Publication Date: April 17, 2008

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.