An alarming news story in the Canadian Star points out that there has been a stunning increase in the number of young girls convicted of violent and vicious crimes:
According to a Statistics Canada report last Thursday, the number of females age 12 and up accused of violent crime climbed between 1986 and 2005.
One statistic in particular is worrying. Among girls, says Female Offenders in Canada, the rate at which they're charged for "serious violent crime" has more than doubled, to 132 teens per 100,000 in 2005 from 60 in 1986. Meanwhile, the rate among adult women climbed to 46 from 25 per 100,000.
For young women, that's an alarming leap - and it's been reflected in some shocking news.
From the brutal swarming, beating and drowning death of B.C.'s Reena Virk in 1997 to last fall's torture by Nova Scotia girls of another teen, girls have been accused of bullying, burning and battering.
In Toronto, one girl, aged 16 - but 15 at the time of the incident - was denied bail last week in connection with the New Year's Day slaying of 14-year-old Stefanie Rengel. The motive, according to the judge, was "senseless jealousy."
While Statistics Canada offers no explanation for any of this increase, Silja J.A. Talvi, author of the recently published Women Behind Bars: The Crisis of Women in the U.S. Prison System, writes, "Girls and women enter the criminal justice system with far higher rates of drug abuse, sexual violence, childhood abuse, mental illness, and experiences with homelessness."
As criminologists and others who study female offenders say, violent girls are often the product of violent homes, and subject to much more stress - from sexual abuse, in particular - than boys.
You can read the rest of this disturbing report at the link.
Sadly, this article confirms the crucial role dysfunctional families, especially emotionally or physically estranged fathers, play in producing aberrant offspring. The one commonality between male and female inmates in our prisons is that their fathers in almost every case were either physically or emotionally absent from their lives or physically or emotionally abusive. Kids need good fathers, and a culture in which parents feel free to split up to pursue their own "happiness", or never marry in the first place, is spawning alarming numbers of wretched children.
Perhaps it's time to restore the social stigma that once attached to unwed motherhood and any divorce that wasn't a last resort. There's a danger, of course, in being too censorious, and we certainly don't want to be the kind of cold, merciless society Hawthorne depicts in The Scarlet Letter. On the other hand, the danger to our children posed by the breakdown of traditional views of marriage and family is too serious and too deadly to allow us to continue to treat marriage as though it were just one of many legitimate ways to raise children.
Parents who aren't willing to commit themselves to each other and to their children should not have them, and, if they do, they deserve the opprobrium of a society that cannot afford the personal tragedy and costs these irresponsible, selfish individuals are inflicting upon everyone else.
RLC