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Why Girls Are Growing More Violent and What We Can Do About It
Penguin
February 2006
304 pages ISBN: 1594200750 Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
"Teen Hazing Turns Vicious," "Gang Beats Man Senseless,"
"Teenagers Indicted for Murder," "School Shooter Sought
Revenge for Put-downs," "Youth Arrested in Murder Plot Aimed
at Parents." The headlines don't seem remarkable: juvenile
violence has always been with us. What is new is that these
stories aren't about boys, they're about girls. Just ten
years ago, almost ten boys were arrested for assault for
every girl. Now the ratio is four to one, and it's dropping
rapidly. What's going on with American girls? See Jane Hit
is the first big-picture answer to this crucial question, a
groundbreaking examination of this hidden epidemic by one of
America's most respected authorities on juvenile violent
aggression. In See Jane Hit, Dr. James Garbarino shows that the rise in
girls' violence is the product of many interrelated cultural
developments, several of which are largely positive. Girls
have learned to express themselves physically in organized
sports�thirty years ago, the number of boys playing
organized sports was more than ten times greater than the
number of girls; now we're almost at 1:1. In a number of
other ways, too, the cultural foot binding that has kept
girls from embracing their own physical power has been
removed, which is largely to be celebrated. But nothing
happens in isolation, and there's rarely such a momentous
societal shift with absolutely no downside. One problem is
that girls aren't being trained to handle their own physical
aggression the way boys are: our methods of child-rearing
culture include all sorts of mechanisms for socializing boys
to express their violence in socially acceptable ways, but
with girls we lag very far behind. At the same time, the
culture has become more toxic for boys and girls alike, and
girls' sexuality is linked with violence in new and
disturbing ways. Ultimately, this brilliant, far-reaching examination of
physical aggression and the "new" American girl shows us
there is much we can do differently. See Jane Hit is not
just a powerful wake-up call; it's a clear-eyed,
compassionate prescription for real-world solutions.
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