Biggest increase in violent injuries found among girls

Teenage girls are victims of soaring levels of serious violence and are seeking treatment at hospital emergency units in record numbers. But attacks on the rest of society are "coming under control", detailed research has found.

The marked increase in attacks on girls aged between 11 and 17 is being linked to changes in the social habits of young females, with girls emulating the binge-drinking culture of teenage boys.

Findings by the Violence Research Group at the University of Wales College of Medicine, in Cardiff, show that across England and Wales the numbers of girls in this age group attending hospital accident and emergency (A&E) departments "increased steadily and significantly" between 1995 and 2000.

The study, published in the Journal of Public Health Medicine, says: "One plausible explanation for the increase in violence-related A&E attendance of girls is greater independence and assertiveness."

The development is all the more marked because the research also showed that violence across all ages and both sexes in England and Wales was "coming under control".

Girls of 11-17 were the only age group of either sex to show a serious increase in violence-related injuries during the period analysed. Researchers found that in spite of the widely held public perception that society was becoming more dangerous, the numbers of people seeking hospital treatment for violence-related injuries was not increasing.

This could mean that high levels of police-recorded violent crime are inflated by street robberies of mobile telephones and other crimes that often do not require hospital treatment.

The study of 353,442 injury victims, reporting at 58 A&E departments across England and Wales, provides a different perspective on violent crime from that offered by police and Home Office statistics.

The study's authors noted: "Police violence statistics and crime surveys have been the traditional national sources of information about violent crime. However, both indices have major limitations. Many violent crimes are not reported to or recorded by the police."

The research also shows that rates of injury vary considerably in different areas of the country. People living in north-west England were more than three times more likely to be admitted to hospital because of violence (1 per cent of population per year) than those living in the South-east (0.31 per cent), South-west (0.29 per cent) and East of England (0.28 per cent) and two and half times more likely than Londoners (0.4 per cent). The next most dangerous regions were Wales (0.9 per cent) and the West Midlands (0.7 per cent). In London, there was a slowing increase in the number of boys under 18 and men over 50 seeking treatment, although there was no rise in injuries among people aged 18-50.

In the North-west, there was a "significant increase" in violence-related injuries to children aged 11-17. The researchers also noticed that A&E attendances varied noticeably according to the time of the year, with violence- related injuries increasing markedly in the summer and falling sharply in the winter.

The report confirmed other studies that show those most at risk of violence are men aged between 18 and 30. The rise in violence among young women may fuel debate about "girl gangs" and the rise of the "alcopops" binge-drinking culture.

One author of the study, Jonathan Shepherd, a professor of oral and maxillofacial surgery, said: "It certainly fits with other sources of information about girls getting more like boys in the ways that they seek entertainment in city centres."

The study refers to findings in an earlier Scottish survey that 98.5 per cent of girls had witnessed violence at first hand and 10 per cent considered themselves to be "violent".

But Professor Shepherd acknowledged that his study did not mean girls perpetrated violence, only that they were more likely to find themselves in violent situations. He said the findings had relevance to government plans to relax the licensing laws to permit 24-hour drinking and let children enter pubs unaccompanied. Professor Shepherd said: "The other side of relaxing licensing laws is better law enforcement."