Have you ever hit someone who hadn’t done anything to you ? When asked this question and other similar ones (Have you ever threatened to beat someone to get what you wanted? Have you ever hit someone because you were annoyed? etc.), 69% of a cohort of 15 year-old girls who have had problems with the law or showed serious behavioural problems answered “yes” in a survey on physical and relational violence in 1993. When criminologist Nadine Lanctôt of University Montreal asked the same teenagers the same questions nine years later, only 37% of them said they were violent. “Our research demonstrates that violent behaviour in girls decreases with age,” she remarks. “The number of violent acts also falls.”

Yet Canadian statistics indicate that violence among young women has increased twice as fast as among young men in the past 10 years. The same trend has also been observed in the United States and the United Kingdom. Surveys on self-confessed delinquency report that boys are three to four times more likely to be involved in violent activities than girls, whereas statistics from the courts indicate that the male-female ratio is about nine-to-one.

By following the same teenagers for several years, Mrs. Lanctôt was able to trace the evolution of violent behaviour. “At 23 years, even girls who were very violent at the age of 15 years had changed their behaviour. Among boys, however, the violence tends to remain.” The professor in the School of Criminology attributes this phenomenon to the internalization of social roles by young women. All their lives, the girls are told that they must be polite and pleasant and that they must care for others. They see these stereotypes in magazines, on television, in their families and groups of friends. As they age, they adopt the social roles that society has defined for them. They raise internal barriers and develop self-control skills.
Unfortunately, violent behaviour leads to other complications. Attempted suicide, drug consumption and depression become more frequent as time goes by. “In fact, the women’s behaviour shifted from causing harm to others to causing harm to themselves.”

Ideally, action should be taken earlier among teenage girls to teach them to replace violent behaviour with techniques to manage anger in a healthy and balanced way. While girls and boys use violence for similar reasons, differences can be noted. For example, girls react more to interpersonal conflicts. Boys use violence to gain status within groups of friends.

Researcher: Nadine Lanctôt
Telephone: (514) 343-7328
Email: nadine.lanctot@umontreal.ca
Funding: Canadian Institutes of Health Reseach, Fonds de la recherche en santé du Québec, Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada