Girls Gone Bad: Statistics Distort the Truth

[cynatnite]

snip:
In a new study, Steffensmeier and colleagues reviewed data from 1980 to 2003 from the Monitoring the Future and National Youth Risk Behavior Surveys and the National Crime Victimization Survey, in which the victim identifies the perpetrator's gender. Girls accounted for 20 percent of the crimes in 1980 and 19 percent in 2003.

snip:
"Some commentators have blamed the perceived change on greater stress in girls' lives, more cultural promotion of girls' aggression and breakdowns in family, church, community and schools," Steffensmeier said. "But today, police are more prone to arrest girls because of a crackdown on less serious forms of 'violent' crime that is seen as a way of warding off their escalation into more serious violence"

snip:
Chesney-Lind concluded there are three things contributing to the rise in arrests for girls for violent crimes:

*Relabeling of behavior as criminal, which sometimes means girls involved in scuffles with family members are arrested for assault.
*Rediscovery of girls' violence by media and policy makers.
*Zero tolerance policies that have the effect of increasing the severity of criminal penalties associated with particular offenses.

"Careful analysis of trends in girls' violence, then fails to confirm that we face a dramatic increase in this troubling behavior," Meda Chesney-Lind said.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/space/20060410/sc_space/girlsgonebadstatisticsdistortthetruth

[benburch]

1. A great book you and everybody else should read!

"How To Lie With Statistics" by Darrell Huff It is an absolute CLASSIC.

[TahitiNut]

2. Let's just think some of this through.

The article attributes at least some of the "perceived change" (a "rise in arrests for girls") to "a crackdown on less serious forms of 'violent' crime."

For this to actually affect the arrest statistics one must believe that there's an overwhelmingly greater number of girls engaging in this "less serious" level of violence than boys. Does that make sense? (I rather doubt it.)