What Popular Girl-On-Girl Fight Videos Really Reveal

(Feb. 2) -- No more Ms. Nice Gal! Among the glut of streaming videos available on the Internet are hundreds of thousands that show young girls pushing, punching and pulling each other's hair – and according to CBS News, the sheer number and popularity of the clips points to a general rise in girl-on-girl violence nationwide. But the flood of footage doesn't necessarily mean the broader trend is afoot.

"There aren't any real statistics yet," said CBS News correspondent Whit Johnson in his report for "The Early Show," "but experts say more disputes between young girls are turning violent. And now with cell phones in the hands of almost every teen, the altercations are going online, making the original issue even worse."


Popular entertainment has a long history of glamorizing choreographed "catfights," generally for the purpose of titillating adult viewers. The online videos popping up now represent an entirely different genre, of course, showing young women, often still in their preteen years, duking it out in front of crowds of their leering peers.

The CBS report concentrates on four specific videos, including one that depicts two young girls coming two blows in a garage as adults watch on the sidelines. The adults were later charged with felony accounts of cruelty to a child. Meanwhile, other girls have been arrested as a result of their participation in videotaped assaults. But in the segment, anchor Maggie Rodriguez stresses that the phenomenon is much larger than a few isolated instances, noting that a Google search for the words "girl fights" produces more than 8 million results. Separately, an AOL News check of YouTube turned up 453,000 results, including CBS's own coverage of the event.

It's difficult to determine just how many of the videos on YouTube are of girls engaging in authentic violence of a criminal nature. YouTube's own community guidelines explicitly forbid users from posting such content, warning that it will be deleted by administrators. However, as a spokeswoman points out, there are far too many videos being uploaded to the Web site every day for administrators to sort through on their own.

"With 20 hours of video uploaded every minute to YouTube, we count on our community members to know the community guidelines and to flag videos they believe violate the rules," Mandy Albanese told AOL News. "At YouTube we take violations of our terms of service very seriously. If someone violates our community guidelines, they will receive a strike against their account. If a user receives three strikes to their account, they'll be banned from the site."

Of course, YouTube is far from the only page that hosts girl-on-girl fight clips. And some of the others do so purposefully. There is even a Web site dedicated to corralling videos of this nature, called "Girl Fights Dump," which assures viewers that they will see daily updates of "the cream of the crop of Girl Fights/Girl Street fights on the net."

While there is a clear audience for this type of material, what remains in question is whether that means girl-on-girl violence is also on the rise nationally, and what effect, if any, the Web videos have on such behavior.

The CBS News report quotes the district attorney of Middlesex, Mass. – the site of several girl-fighting videos – who claims 80 percent of the school fights in his area are now between girls. He explicitly ties the trend to the Internet videos, saying their popularity motivates attention-seeking young people to trade punches for the sake of broadcasting them.

Superficially, nationwide statistics appear to echo what is going on in the Bay State. According to a May 2008 study by the Justice Department's Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, "boys' arrests for aggravated assault decreased nearly one-quarter (–23 percent) between 1996 and 2005, while girls' arrests decreased far less (–5 percent). In contrast, girls' arrests for simple assault increased nearly one-quarter (24 percent), while boys' arrests decreased slightly (–4 percent)."

However, as the Justice Department goes on to note in the same report, "Available evidence based on arrest, victimization and self-report data suggests that although girls are cur­rently arrested more for simple assaults than previously, the actual incidence of their being seriously vio­lent has not changed much over the last two decades. ... There is no burgeoning national crisis of increasing serious violence among adolescent girls."

The authors argue that the reason girls are arrested more now for such violence is because of "changes in enforcement" – that is, the increased attention given to the problem by parents, schools and law enforcement.

The study did not specifically analyze the effects of "girl fight" videos on young women's behavior. But in concluding that today's girls are no more violent than previous generations, the authors also offer an explanation for those instances when they do lash out, pegging the blame on the "rigidity" of society's longstanding expectations for how young women should look and act. When one accuses another of not adhering to the norms, tempers flare, and fists sometimes fly.

But fly more often than they used to? On that, there's still – as CBS acknowledges – no hard proof. It seems that the notion of an epidemic of girl-on-girl violence, like the popularity of the girl-fight videos themselves, is at least partly the product of overactive imaginations.