In the first two decades of this century, there was a common TV stereotype of the “female delinquent”. Think Little Britain’s Vicky Pollard, Catherine Tate’s Lauren Cooper or This Country’s Kerry Mucklowe. They all exemplified the antisocial, inarticulate, obnoxious teenage girl, who petulantly apes boys’ more yobbish behavior. These “chavettes” may seem like relics of a not-so-distant past, but their petty criminality looks trivial compared to the rise in female violent crime over the last five years.

Since 2019, the number of women and girls aged 20 or under arrested for violent crime has risen by almost 24%. Last year, a record number of girls under 18 were sentenced for serious violent crimes, and a record number of girls were responsible for assaults and actual bodily harm on emergency workers. There have been extreme cases of girls involved in the most heinous of crimes. For example, a girl was one of three teenagers convicted of killing a man whom they claimed to believe was a paedophile on a beach in Kent last August. There are also plenty of examples of girls partaking in other, less serious offenses, such as the looting in Clapham earlier this year.

Some have blamed lockdowns for the rise in female crime. Charlotte Armitage, a psychologist, claimed the rise in antisocial behavior was linked to school closures and isolation during the Covid pandemic: the lack of structure, coupled with children from abusive households having no reprieve during the school day, reportedly led to a steep rise in mental health problems as vulnerable children sought refuge online. Yet we can only blame lockdowns for so long. There are many other factors at play: the cost-of-living crisis and low aspirations, the breakdown of family structures and lack of authority figures, failures of parenting and poor discipline.

Then there’s the dark side of “girl power”, where young women are seemingly “rewarded” for acting more aggressively, while also claiming victimhood. For example, a train security guard in Dorset was verbally abused earlier this year after he confronted two teenage girls who were misbehaving near the tracks, only to then have the girls falsely claim he assaulted them. This is a learned behavior: young girls are taught that they should act more like boys but still be afraid of them, and so they weaponize their “victimhood” or twist the power dynamic to be protected from the consequences of their actions.

Internet spaces have indeed replaced family and neighborhood communities, but what has changed the most since 2019 isn’t the lack of structure in the real world, but instead the algorithmic structure of online life. Social media algorithms reward attention-seeking, confrontational, and impulsive behavior. There are scores of accounts in which “street interviewers” record young, wannabe-gangster girls in small towns boasting about their “beef” with other teenagers, while rappers such as Ceechynaa, Ivorian Doll and Ms Banks write viral songs about getting revenge on “opps” (opponents). In 2020, the most-liked video on TikTok was set to a song called “M to the B”, a “diss track” written by a 16-year-old girl talking about her ongoing rivalry with another teenager, calling her a “slag”.

Online subcultures that encourage gang violence, drill rap and street fighting have previously been predominantly male domains. Yet content which glamorizes violent culture is now also pushed on women, all in the name of driving engagement. We frequently see how social media normalizes the abnormal: 70% of teenagers have seen real-life violence online. The problem is therefore not the removal of physical spaces which took place during lockdown, but the creation of new online ones that have turned violence — perpetrated by both sexes — into a form of entertainment.

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Kristina Murkett is a freelance writer and English teacher.

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