ABSTRACT
Concern about the female gangster is not new of course. In the early 1980s Anne Campbell investigated the phenomenon of violence amongst girls and young women (Campbell, 1981) and female gang membership (Campbell, 1984). Although Campbell’s work was situated within a context of rising concern about female offending, she concluded that dominant conceptualizations of female
(gang) violence were exaggerated, effectively comprising a ‘moral panic’ (Cohen, 1980). Indeed, Campbell argued that the female gang phenomenon in the UK was, in essence, a social construction. She observed that male gangs were rare in Britain and since female gangs tend to follow (rather than precede) male gangs – as her research on gang girls in New York, USA illustrated – it was very unlikely that young women in the UK were organizing into gangs in any great numbers (Campbell, 1995). A decade on and a further ‘panic’ ensued, centred this time on the ‘yob woman’ and ‘tank girl’. In a similar critique to Campbell’s, Anne Worrall (1995) argued persuasively that the furore that surrounded ‘tank girl’1 was underpinned by occasional atypical events as distinct from a sustained rise in the incidence of female violence. Notwithstanding such evidence-based critique, over the last decade authoritative sources have increasingly argued that there is a rise in female violence in general and a growing girl gang problem in particular. The former Metropolitan Police Chief Commissioner, Sir Ian Blair, for example, has suggested that the gang situation in the UK is the second most pressing policing issue after terrorism (The London Paper, 3 January 2008). Similarly, the Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, has referred to a ‘culture of stabbing’ that exists amongst young people in the capital and the ‘gang culture’ in which some young people are caught up (The London Paper, 16 June 2008).
