Girls on the Go
January 11, 2010
Two teenagers, one possibly as young as 12, walked into a bank in suburban Cincinnati last week and demanded cash. They did not have weapons. The bank turned the money over.
There are two interesting aspects to this story: the ease with which unarmed teenagers committed a robbery of a financial institution with surveillance cameras in broad daylight and the fact that the teenagers were girls.
According to this USA Today story about the case, crime among teenage girls has risen 38 percent since 1999. The article states:
Although robbery by females is not as common as robbery by males, the gender gap is narrowing, said James Garbarino, professor of child psychology at Loyola University in Chicago and author of See Jane Hit: Why Girls are Growing More Violent and What We Can Do About It.
“Parents are telling their girls, ‘You can do anything a boy can.’ That makes them now vulnerable” to television violence and other social influences, Garbarino said.
The two girls, who are black, are apparently still at large, anothing astounding facet of this story. There are no news reports stating otherwise.
A. Servant, who drew my attention to the story, writes:
I have to ask myself what have I been doing working all these years in light of this story. If all it takes is for a couple of female adolescents to ask for money from a teller and then just walk away free as a bird, I feel really, really foolish. But then again, you probably have to be a female adolescent to get away with it, so I would be doing 25 to life probably.
Laura writes:
Mr. Servant would probably find a life of crime unrewarding, maybe even dull, in the long run. However, he’s right. If this job was done by two males, they’d probably be sitting in jail right now.
Fitzgerald writes:
I like what Tim Allen said in his stand-up routine about the opportunities for a man in today’s world: Men have two choices, go to work or go to jail. That’s it. Women have lots of choices, but men only two.
Laura writes:
That’s a riot. Funny, but true.
