In Britain, in recent years, violent and aggressive behaviour by teenage girls has received considerable media attention. In 1996, the attack on actress Elizabeth Hurley by four girls in the West End of London received extensive coverage. Other reports followed, highlighting girl gangs, bullying and the torturing of victims by girls. Indeed, some writers maintain that violence by girls constitutes a new ‘moral panic’. Media reportage invariably links this ‘new phenomenon’ with more established concerns about the rise in youth crime, increased social disorder and a decline in social and moral values. What is of particular interest, however, is the shift in focus from ‘dangerous’ young men to ‘dangerous’ young women and the highly gendered ways in which violence by girls is popularly depicted and explained.

With some notable exceptions girls’ violence has, until recently, attracted relatively little academic interest and thus little is known about the role of violence in girls’ lives. Violence by young men has been explicitly and extensively considered – indeed, sociological theorisations of violence and anti-social behaviour have been based almost exclusively on male behaviour. This is as true for the earlier subcultural explanations focusing on the activities of working-class (male) youth, and social learning explanations that stress the importance of boys’ peer groups, as it is for more recent research on individual-level predictors stressing personality, genetic and/or social characteristics. In more general studies of crime and criminal behaviour women and girls have been similarly overlooked.

The psychological literature on violence – although vast – has a history of being similarly gender-blind. This is most marked in relation to psychological studies of childhood aggression. Developmental accounts of violence and aggression in childhood subsume and hide girls through the frequent use of homogeneous and gender-neutral categories. Undifferentiated and over-generalised concepts, such as ‘child’ and ‘children’, obscure the fact that the focus is invariably on boys.

Some psychological literature, however, has concentrated on differences between boys’ and girls’ aggression. It is boys who are regularly described as ‘acting out’, who exhibit ‘conduct disorders’, and who are said to engage in extreme acts of violence. The expression of anger in girls and young women is conceptualised as very ‘different’ from that of males. Recent work by such researchers as Rys and Bear and Björkqvist, Osterman and Kaukiainen, for example, has extended definitions of ‘aggression’ to include what is termed ‘indirect social aggression’ which involves manipulation of social relationships.