The Girl Gangs

They can be amiable and unassuming by day, indistinguishable from other British teen-age girls. But at night they become birds of prey. Sometimes silently, sometimes shrieking, they swoop down in groups on unsuspecting victims in dark streets, at lonely bus stops and in deserted toilets. Kicking, biting, scratching, punching, they reduce the victim--usually another female--to hysteria and then disappear, stealing perhaps only a few pence. To Londoners, they are known as the bovver (cockney for bother, which in turn means fight) birds, the newest and in some ways the eeriest street gangs since the Teddy boys terrorized London in the '50s.

London police currently count some 30 gangs of bovver birds, including a quartet that attacked a 55-year-old baker walking home in south London last July. "It was suddenly like having banshees wailing in my ear," the baker recounted. "They kept screaming while two of them took my arms and one jabbed my back with what felt like a knife blade. They made me kneel down with the side of my face against the pavement, and they took everything I had. Then one of them took her foot and crushed my head against the pavement."

Muggings Up. In a more recent case, two teen-agers viciously kicked and beat up a 22-year-old girl in a toilet during a football game. Last month three bovver birds were sentenced to up to two years each in reform school for pulling a 25-year-old schoolteacher to the ground at a west London bus stop and kicking her until her face was covered with blood. "The girls are even tougher than the boys," said one judge at Old Bailey last week. "It was once assumed that if a man and a woman committed a crime, the woman was under the domination of the man. I think that's now rubbish from what I've seen."

The growth of the girl gangs has paralleled an alarming rise in muggings that began last year. In the first six months of 1972, muggings in the most heavily populated areas of London were up by as much as 70%, and Scotland Yard recently established two special plainclothes squads to combat the trend.

The female teeny-bashers are harder to catch than their male counterparts. They are seldom seen swaggering, boasting or clustering in gangs, and they affect no distinctive style of dress or appearance. Male criminals generally are products of the poorer sections of London, but some of the bovver birds come from such tony neighborhoods as Kensington, Knightsbridge and Chelsea.

One recent mugging was carried out by a girl who had a good job as a secretary to a company director; her father is an executive and she lives in the family's $65,000 house and has her own car and a horse. Another female mugger is Brenda F., 17, who comes from a middle-class London family. Brenda got her start in violent crime earlier this year by acting as a decoy prostitute for her boy friend's gang. After the first mugging, she carefully put her share of the booty--970--into a locked chest in her bedroom at home, next to her old dolls and the gear of her new trade: a wig, tennis shoes and a half-face mask. Then, as she told TIME Correspondent William McWhirter last week, she "just got fed up following the boys." So she branched out on her own, leading three girl friends in the mugging of an old woman, which she cheerfully calls "granny bashing."

Brenda is typical of the bovver birds. "They seem very unmoved by it all, very detached," says a probation officer. "Many of their attacks are for pure game, mostly done on the spur of the moment." Says Trevor Gibbens, forensic psychiatrist at the University of London and the author of several research studies of girl offenders: "Girls who used to grow up in relatively sheltered homes now freely roam the streets just like the boys have always done. It is a natural result that, in becoming equal, they have become equal in all areas, including violence."

The girls are also a considerable bother to London police, who have had difficulty in spotting the gangs before they commit a crime and communicating with the relatively few who are caught. "It's like talking to someone of another race," says one officer. "We don't really know when to yell at them, threaten or go gently. We just don't know much, that's all." The fear among some policemen is that the bovver birds, more adept at disguise than male street gangs, and appearing less threatening, will eventually become more proficient than men in the way of violent crime.

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