Growing number of fights beween teenage girls being planned and shared on social media

Police are warning a growing number of teenage girls are risking serious injury by getting involved in violent fights. Social media is being used to plan the vicious brawls, then broadcast them on the internet. A Queensland researcher has started tracking down girls who fight and interviewing them, in a bid to find ways to intervene.
 
TIM PALMER: Police and parents are battling a brutal trend among Australian girls.
Some teenagers are using social media to plan violent fights, then post them on the internet.
A Queensland researcher has started tracking down girls who fight; interviewing them, hoping it might reveal ways to intervene.
Stephanie Smail reports.

STEPHANIE SMAIL: Girls attacking each other on the street.
The vicious fights aren't spontaneous. The battles are carefully planned, then filmed by onlookers and posted online. They take place in the city and the country, outside school hours.
It's a daily challenge for Senior Constable Adrienne Harries, a school-based police officer on Brisbane's bayside.

ADRIENNE HARRIES: I've been doing this for three or four years now. I've seen the increase of girls fighting - and younger girls, girls probably 13 to 15 years old.

STEPHANIE SMAIL: Senior Constable Harries says the fights are often easy to access online after the fact, but the planning is hidden from police and parents, making it harder to stop the violence.

ADRIENNE HARRIES: Parents and teachers and police, we're missing a lot of the new stuff that's coming out. We can't access a lot of the things that they're accessing. A new app starts every day and, you know, we can't keep up with all the stuff that's going on.

STEPHANIE SMAIL: Evidence shows careful planning goes into the location of the fights. Girls avoid their school grounds, where they can be easily identified, instead choosing public places like local parks or shopping centres, where onlookers who won't intervene can watch them brawl.

ADRIENNE HARRIES: If someone makes a complaint to police, then police do get involved - so for an assault or something like that.
But often, no, I guess they get away with it. It's undetected and it goes on to the you know, it causes anxiety and stress for a lot of the girls because they come to school every day and they have to face these people and then it follows them home as well. It's not something they can get away with in their home.

STEPHANIE SMAIL: Ashleigh Larkin from the Queensland University of Technology's law school is investigating the issue.

ASHLEIGH LARKIN: If you just do a basic Google search for "girl fight video", you get about 300 million hits. YouTube alone: there are hundreds of millions of fights available. They've been viewed millions of times with hundreds of thousands of viewer comments.

STEPHANIE SMAIL: What are some of the comments?

ASHLEIGH LARKIN: They will encourage the fight. So if there was a particularly good hit or a brutal sort of altercation, they'll sort of say, "Oh, that was a really good punch" or, you know, "She did really well."

STEPHANIE SMAIL: It's a dangerous game, physically and emotionally.

ONLOOKER: Just keep punching her from underneath! Just punch her from underneath...

STEPHANIE SMAIL: But Ashleigh Larkin says girls aren't shying away from the violence.

ASHLEIGH LARKIN: There's definite potential for serious injury in that these sort of have an expectation that they need to fight in a very brutal sort of manner. So it's not like your traditional "catfight" that you'd sort of think about if you were thinking about girls fighting. It's more like a full-on punch-up.

STEPHANIE SMAIL: The researcher is in the process of speaking to girls who fight in a bid to find ways to intervene. She's encouraging others to share their story to help break up the brawls.

ASHLEIGH LARKIN: The young women I've spoken to are in sort of the 14 to 17 age group. They tend to fight generally because they're having a personal issue with the other young women who are involved, whether they just don't like them or they've had a fight over a boy or that kind of girl drama that sort of happens.

FIGHTER: You want to go again? Huh?

STEPHANIE SMAIL: Police like Senior Constable Harries are running intervention programs in schools, speaking to thousands of students every year about ways to avoid this sort of brutality. She's hopeful the message will eventually hit home.

ADRIENNE HARRIES: I don't know what we can do. I think we can just keep talking, give them the offered advice. What they do with that advice is something that we can't control.

STEPHANIE SMAIL: Is it worrying to you?

ADRIENNE HARRIES: Yeah, very worrying. And we're doing a lot of work around it but I don't know what the answers are.

TIM PALMER: Queensland Police officer Adrienne Harries; Stephanie Smail reporting.


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