Offending Girls: Young Women and Youth Justice

At the dawn of the twenty-first century, panic about girls’ offending in Britain reached fever pitch. No longer sugar and spice, a ‘new breed’ of girl, the hedonistic, violent, binge-drinking ‘ladette’, was reported to have emerged. At the same time, the number of young women entering the youth justice system, including youth custody, increased dramatically.

Offending Girls challenges simplistic and demonising popular representations of 'bad' girls and examines what exactly is new about the...