Faculty book excerpt: ‘See Jane Hit’
James Garbarino, Ph.D., the Maude C. Clarke Chair in Humanistic Psychology, has spent 30 years seeking to understand, prevent and resolve violence in the lives of children and youth. His new book for both academic and general audiences, See Jane Hit: Why Girls are Growing More Violent and What We Can Do About It (Penguin Press, 2006), explores causes and solutions in the growing phenomenon of aggression and violence among girls.
Mostly I have been concerned with the violent and aggressive behavior of boys, with girls appearing in my writing mainly as victims.
I find myself starting over, focusing on aggressive girls rather than boys because the new social and psychological realities demand such a shift of focus. According to the U.S. Department of Justice, the last decade of the 20th century witnessed a dramatic shift in criminal violence rates for girls and boys…criminal violence perpetrated by adolescent females increased at a time when the rate for adolescent males was decreasing.
Girls are learning martial arts, participating in contact sports and generally roughhousing more than ever before…They are also hitting people more and more on the playing fields of our communities; in our movies and television programs; in the classrooms, hallways and cafeterias of our schools; and in the living rooms and kitchens of our homes.
The issue we face is not simply the thousands of criminally violent girls who make the headlines and go to prison or the hundreds of girls who kill themselves each year, but the larger question of how and why the role of physical aggression in girls is changing across the board. It’s about the changing lives of our daughters, our nieces, our sisters and our granddaughters, for better and for worse. It’s time to take a good hard look at changing patterns of physicality and aggression in girls.