If we get into a fight," says Jamie, "you're not gonna call the cops on us, are you?" I'm sitting in the living room of a hostel for homeless Aboriginal women and children in Sydney's west, talking to two young self-confessed "bad bitches" who in 2011 were charged with carjacking and larceny.
Jamie and Leeyah, 18 and 17 at the time respectively, along with another teenage girl, were crossing a road on their way to meet their drug dealer in Toongabbie when they spotted a woman parking her car and, more importantly, the handbag on her lap. Leeyah lunged at the open window, grabbed the handbag and pulled the driver from the car. She then jumped behind the wheel and threw the bag on the floor while Jamie leaped into the passenger side and the third girl dove into the back. They took off at high speed down the laneway, careened around a corner and onto a main street.
For the next two-and-a-half weeks they joy-rode through outer Sydney, buying and using drugs and accidentally hitting telegraph poles and garbage bins. The girls were finally caught when a drunk relative crashed the car near a breathalyser unit.
Jamie and Leeyah have agreed to meet me to discuss their lives and the perceived rise of underage violence and gang activities among Australian girls. According to NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics data, the number of juvenile female offenders soared by 36 per cent in the decade to June 2009, compared to an 8 per cent increase for juvenile males.
There's anecdotal evidence, too. In September 2011, YouTube clips of pre-arranged brawls between girls as young as 14 in Sydney's south-west went viral and were reported throughout the world. The same year, four girls, aged 14 and 15, bashed and robbed a 26-year-old woman in Sydney's south-east while she was waiting for a bus. Last January, two 14-year-old girls attempted to rob a man on a Sydney train by punching him in the face and burning his head with a lit cigarette. The same week, two more girls, aged 16 and 17, tried to hold up a man at Lakemba train station with a pair of fake guns.
I'm especially curious about this phenomenon because as a teenager I grew up in a public housing estate in Carlton, Melbourne, with an alcoholic single mother, after having been on the run for a year - and through three states - from my violent stepfather. During that time I got into drugs (cocaine, marijuana, LSD), did a fair bit of shoplifting, and was busted once for writing graffiti. But it never occurred to me to join a group of other girls and attack a stranger for money or other possessions. As a 15-year-old, if I needed cash I did it the traditional way: babysitting, cleaning houses, teaching children to swim.
"I just wanna know," says a slim woman in her early 40s, leaning against the doorjamb of the hostel's living room and folding her arms, "are you undercover or what?" This is Jamie's mother, who also lives in the hostel. I have to stop myself from laughing. "If I were an undercover cop," I answer, "do you think I'd tell you?" After giving me a dismissive once-over, she nods to her daughter and disappears down the hall.
Jamie's face has a girlish gentleness, but when I ask her where she grew up and where she went to school, her expression clouds. "I grew up in DOCS," she confesses. "I grew up all over." In foster homes?
She nods and explains that her three sisters also grew up in state care. She looks into her lap and fiddles with her mobile. "I only met my real mother three years ago."
Jamie tells me that when she was 13 she was released into the care of an aunt. In a Faginesque twist, a relative forced her to shoplift. As a consequence, Jamie ran away from home and lived with an uncle for three weeks before he was arrested and jailed for drug abuse. By the time she was 16, she had been placed with a foster family at Kemps Creek, but only lasted three days before running away yet again, ending up in the care of another relative who, she says, also demanded that she shoplift and steal.
As Jamie talks, her breathing grows short and she becomes agitated, pulling on her ponytail, turning the phone in her hands, as if she's reliving a time she'd rather forget. She met her closest ally, cousin Leeyah, three years ago, and since then they've become inseparable. During that short time they've also managed to get into an extraordinary amount of trouble together.
"It usually happens when we want to get on [pot]," explains Leeyah. "We're okay if we can have a cone first thing in the morning, but if we can't we get really stressed and that's usually when we tend to get violent."
When I ask about details of the carjacking two years ago, Leeyah's eyes widen and she shoots me a cheeky grin. "We don't just rob anyone," she replies, shaking her head. "Like, we wouldn't have stolen the car if there'd been a baby in the back, or if it'd been an old person driving."
She pauses and crosses her arms: "We do have ethics, you know!"
Leeyah goes on to tell me that she grew up on a public-housing estate with 17 siblings in Sydney's west and has convictions dating back to the age of 12, when she attempted to rob a woman at an ATM. Since then, she has been in out and of juvenile detention centres for various crimes, including theft, assault, and intimidating a police officer. "People think juvenile detention is a bad influence on kids, but really it's a f...ing paradise!" When Leeyah smiles, her face glows with a sepia-toned beauty. "There's swimming pools, sports ovals, nice rooms ..."
Her eyes flicker around the hostel's pale grey walls. I lean forward. "So did you keep committing crimes so you could go back to juvie?"
She laughs to herself and nods. "Course! Who'd ever want to leave there? It's a f...ing paradise!"
It's now 5pm and the hostel's dinner bell has rung. As I prepare to leave I ask them both what they think will happen to them beyond this - living day to day at the hostel, carjacking and rolling people for money. The girls fall quiet for a few moments and the gale outside rattles the window panes.
"I think I'll end up in jail," Leeyah finally admits, without a trace of self-pity.
I suggest that there seems to be only two options for girls in her situation - going to jail, or getting pregnant and getting into the system that way.
Leeyah glances across at Jamie and briefly smiles. "And I think you'll be the one who'll get pregnant," she says, pointing at her cousin. Jamie thinks for a moment, grins shyly, and agrees.
It would be easy to assume that the rise of underage female crime is limited to Sydney and Melbourne, but smaller cities and regional areas have become just as dangerous. Five years ago, for example, 39-year-old mother-of-three Tanya Rowe died as a result of being bashed by a gang of girls outside a Perth railway station. Another attack and robbery occurred in May, 2011, also at a Perth station, after one gang member stole a woman's handbag and the 20 or so others turned on the victim, dragging her to the ground by her hair and punching and kicking her face and body, leaving her with a shattered cheekbone and missing teeth. And in 2010, Newcastle police were hunting a group of girls nicknamed "the Pyjama Gang", who were sneaking out at night in their boxer shorts and dressing gowns to roll women for money and phones.
In the northern NSW town of Casino in 2008, a gang of five girls attacked then 17-year-old Julie-Anne Gill one Friday night. In spite of a police highway patrol car passing during the beginning of the incident, and two security guards watching on from the nightclub across the road, Gill was pushed to the ground, dragged along the road and kicked and punched for 20 minutes. As a result, she sustained a black eye, fractured nose, chipped tooth, skinned legs and ripped toenails.
"It still affects me every day," the mother of two tells me over the phone. "For a while afterwards I slept in my mother's bed with her. I had nightmares. It took me two years before I could walk downtown on my own. Even now, I'm still scared." What made the attack even worse, she adds in a shaky voice, was that it occurred only 12 weeks after her father had passed away.
Gill believes that in her case the attack was random and possibly a case of mistaken identity. "A lot of kids do it because they're bored - because there's nothing to do in the town." She tells me that two weeks after she was bashed, another gang of girls attacked two of her closest friends outside the Casino Golf Club, knocking out several teeth from one of them, before stealing their purses and mobile phones.
She agrees that some of the problems are due to slack parenting and underage drinking, but for her the situation is much more complicated. "Here in Casino we don't have a police force on the weekends. If there's any trouble we've got to call the cops in Lismore [30 kilometres away] and half the time they don't even turn up."
She adds that many residents of the town, when reporting a crime, are often forced to exaggerate the severity of an incident in order to be taken seriously by the Lismore police. "They keep doing it because they can get away with it," she says. "There's no authority."
When I tell the Melbourne taxi driver I want to go to the suburb of Sunshine, the first thing he asks me is, "Why?" He says he rarely takes fares to or from Sunshine because he's been robbed too many times. "By teenage girls?" I ask. He nods and adjusts the rear-view mirror. "Once they get close to home they just jump out of the cab and run!"
I've heard it said that Sunshine is so beset with violent teenage girls that housewives now carry two handbags when they catch the train - one for their belongings and one to give up in case they're robbed. And Sunshine is far from the only troubled Melbourne suburb. As we drive up Flemington Road, I remember reading about a 34-year-old woman who, in February 2010, was assaulted and robbed at knifepoint by two teenage girls while waiting for a bus outside Glenroy railway station. As the cab swings through Footscray, past gaudy graffiti and the long shadows of housing department high rises, I also recall that, last year, a gang of four girls attacked 17-year-old Chantelle Papi in Fawkner before stealing her credit cards, mobile phone, and identification.
University of Tasmania criminologist Professor Rob White, who last month published the book Youth Gangs, Violence and Social Respect, argues that most of what the media reports about female teenage violence in Australia is not related to gang activity in the conventional sense (initiations, tattoos, tags and territorialism) but is more a result of loose-knit groups of girlfriends and/or relations who enjoy getting into trouble.
White maintains that, for some young women, fighting is indeed "a regular part of their street experience [and] motivated by excitement, status and protection", adding that "over half of all female appearances in juvenile court are related to acts intended to cause injury or theft".
In a laneway near Sunshine railway station, a boom box blares rap music as teenage boys spray graffiti. A group of Sudanese teenage girls, with long, egret-like legs protruding from their school uniforms, pauses to watch them. The suburb is a stew of ethnicities and businesses: discount variety stores, African dress shops, tattoo parlours, tobacco outlets, Vietnamese sweet stores and pawn shops. Suddenly a toddler appears wearing pink gumboots. Holding a toy mobile phone, she's intrigued by the rap music and begins to dance in circles. Her young, pregnant mother struggles past, pushing a stroller against the wind. Inside lies a baby with a chocolate-ringed mouth and watery blue eyes.
While the toddler continues to dance, I chat with the mother, Tanya. She admits that as a teenager she fell in with the wrong crowd through a boyfriend and got into hard drugs. Now, at 28, she has three children under nine, two stepchildren, and a baby due in six weeks' time. The irony is that she has become terrified of the very same kind of teenagers she once embraced.
She tells me that, just before Christmas last year, she was walking out of a store with her kids when a group of teenage girls slammed the baby's stroller over, with the infant still inside, and made off with the baby bag that had been hanging from the handle. When police found and returned the discarded bag the next day, everything was missing: $100, an heirloom ring and the toddler's clothes, disposable nappies and formula.
As her daughter continues to dance, Tanya lights a Longbeach. She tells me that last year she was waiting with her kids on a platform at the railway station when her eight-year-old daughter walked into the public toilet and accidentally interrupted two teenage girls shooting up heroin outside the stalls. The teenagers first began verbally abusing the daughter for "f...king up their fit" and pushed her outside. When Tanya attempted to intervene, the girls slammed her up against a wall and threatened to bash her senseless unless she compensated them for the heroin they'd accidentally spilled. While they continued to threaten and rough up Tanya, the quick-thinking eight-year-old grabbed the baby stroller, ran down the platform with it, out of harm's way, and used her mother's mobile to call 000.
Now, as the toddler continues to dance to the booming rap music, waving her fake mobile like a fairy wand, I can imagine her in about 10 years' time, trawling the same lanes and streets, still intrigued by music and mobile phones, but no longer so fresh-faced and innocent.
The following day I meet youth worker les Twentyman in a cafe overlooking Whitten Oval in Footscray. The offices of his foundation, the 20th Man Fund, are just down the road, and were established over two decades ago to provide social services for Melbourne's troubled teens.
With his white hair and beard and twinkling eyes, Twentyman looks more like a grandfather who could double as Santa Claus than a tireless worker trawling Melbourne's streets at night, helping the young, the violent, the drug-addicted, and the abused. "The problems [of violent girls] often stem from homelessness," says Twentyman, gazing over the empty sports field. "These girls are often getting abused at home, in so many ways - it could be incest or parents on crack or whatever - and running away, getting into gangs and drugs ... well, living like that is often better, for them, than being abused at home."
He tells me that earlier this year he reunited a formerly homeless 15-year-old girl with her mother and stepfather, after the parents had passed all safety checks with DOCS and other services. But the girl only remained with them for a few days before running away again. Twentyman recently discovered the reason for the second disappearance: the mother and stepfather had established an unlicensed brothel in the home and expected the daughter to service clients.
He tells me that there are three main girl gangs currently operating in Melbourne, the Lavs (from the suburb of Laverton), the West Sides, and the Dun-bees: "The Lavs are all Pacific Islander girls who are having trouble transitioning from primary school to high school, the West Sides are a gang who bash up any girls who dare to go out with any of their ex-boyfriends, and a couple of years ago Dun-bees were involved in the stabbing of two people in Sunshine."
All three groups appear to have emerged from established male gangs. I've noticed, however, some crucial differences between the male and female gang members. Male gang members are usually aged between 17 and 26; they brawl with machetes, bottles, poles, knuckle-dusters and knives; and most admit that riots and fights arise because they are protecting their "territories". Members of a girl gangs, on the other hand, can be as young as 12, usually don't use dangerous weapons, and prefer attacking victims by punching, kicking and hair-pulling. Their prime motivation, it seems, is not protecting their "area", like the males, but stealing for materialistic reasons.
Nearly all of these girls come from disadvantaged areas. They don't have much power and enjoy very little respect from the wider community. They're also bombarded daily with images and narratives promoting materialism and excess, yet they have little access to the wealth they witness. Hence the obsession with beating up older, more affluent women and stealing possessions that will earn them peer respect: cars, cash, handbags and mobiles.
Twentyman scoops his phone from the table and begins stabbing the keys. After a brief "Hello", he hands the mobile over to me and I find myself talking to Detective Superintendent Pat Boyle, a deep-voiced man completing an MA thesis on Melbourne gang activity who has been in the force for 37 years. "A lot of guys in gangs will use their girlfriends - that's how they get involved," he says. "They get them to carry the drugs and the guns, 'cause the guys think it's safer."
In Darwin recently, a gang of teenage girls attacked four young women in Smith Street Mall, with one victim being dragged by her hair along the pavement while others kicked her in the back and their male friends stood back and watched. And in 2010, two teenage girls and a 20-year-old man from Casino took turns to stab a man six times in the car park of a tourist lookout near Kyogle. The three also filmed the torture on their mobile phones before rolling the wounded man over an embankment.
Detective Boyle tells me that when the police are confronted by gangs of both boys and girls in Melbourne, "the girls are the most violent, especially when they're drunk. They like showing off in front of their boyfriends."
When I inquire about the potential benefits of juvenile detention - counselling, health and education services - Boyle is not overly enthusiastic. "Though there are systems in place to rehabilitate youth, there is still a need for the individual to make the most of those opportunities, and there can be peer group pressure that upsets those with potential for change. This is also no different outside those environments."
I ask Twentyman what might be done to assist girls who get into trouble at such a premature age. He fixes me with a hard, blue-eyed stare: "We've got to start dealing with these girls as victims rather than locking them up all the time."
He goes on to explain that the baby bonus - currently at $5000 for the first child - has not helped the plight of vulnerable young women. "There's the old cliché of teenage mums splurging on flat-screen TVs, but most of the time, in this kind of culture, it's the boyfriend who takes the $5000 bonus and blows it all on drugs."
Twentyman hands me his phone again and I find myself talking to 16-year-old Crystal, who joined the Dun-Bees gang at age 13 and spent a couple of years with them. Expecting to hear a voice cracked and corrupted by her experiences, I'm shocked to hear instead what seems like a soft-voiced seven-year-old who has suddenly found herself lost in a fairground.
Crystal says that when she was a member, the gang consisted of about 10 girls, all aged between 13 and 14. "We used to just get really drunk," she confesses. "And then we'd go into the city and bash and rob people."
Twentyman explains that Crystal had a violent upbringing and that her mother is a former heroin addict. "These days, lots of kids are growing up around hard drugs in the home," he says. "It becomes normal. Then they stop going to school and start getting into trouble."
In the past year, more than 2000 children have been expelled from schools in Melbourne's western suburbs, but Twentyman is adamant that punishing kids by refusing them an education is neither effective nor fair, and he cites the 56 per cent unemployment rate of teenagers aged 15 to 19 in Melbourne's north-west.
"I'd also recommend the introduction of compulsory national service for teenagers not in school or being employed," he adds. "Not for military training, but to gain life skills, job skills, and to improve their self-esteem."
Back in Sydney, I meet Jamie and Leeyah to have their pictures taken. As the photographer sets up the camera in a lane by the railway, I ask Jamie if she'd been abused during her years in foster care. She flicks her hair back and nods. "I had to clean their houses for them. Babysit for them. Steal for some of them. I was treated like a slave," she says, shivering in the wind. "A slave," she adds for emphasis.
She admits she was fortunate in that she was never sexually abused in care, but when I ask how many foster homes she's grown up in, her eyes are suddenly glazed and remote. She finally shakes her head. "There's been so many. I can't remember."
As a train roars above us, I decide to change the subject: "Do you have any plans for the weekend?"
Her eyebrows do a little dance. "Shake and take," she murmurs.
On the trains?
"Yeah, well we have to," she replies. "We need to get some yarny [marijuana] and everything we've got is in hock at the moment."
When two Asian women amble up the lane and begin to pass us, Jamie can't help herself - she reaches out playfully and touches the large purse one of them is carrying. The woman reels away, terrified, not realising that Jamie at this moment is only horsing around. I find it a telling piece of improvised acting on Jamie's part, demonstrating to me how easy it is for her to snatch a bag and get away with it.
I ask Leeyah if jail is better than juvenile detention. "Jail's m-a-a-a-d, eh?" she replies enthusiastically. She admits that she didn't even mind being in isolation for two weeks, her punishment for having "hit a screw". "There was only a shower and a bed and I was only allowed out for an hour a day. But they let me draw in isolation - that's what I like doing, drawing - and I could also smoke in the cell, so I didn't care."
Leeyah also tells me she got into trouble after the marijuana supply in the prison dried up. "I made a deal with one of the gardeners: I traded tobacco for a can of petrol that I could sniff." She was busted after displaying manic behaviour and reeking of fumes, ending up in isolation yet again.
As the girls shiver in the westerly wind and stare down the lens of the camera, I think back to my teenage years. My mother may have been single, alcoholic and living in public housing, but she always had dinner on the table at 6pm, made sure I went to school, encouraged me in my desire to write, and never failed to let me know that I was loved unconditionally. I eventually grew out of that rebellious stage and by the age of 17 began to study visual art instead.
Purple-black clouds are massing above us and there's the smell of rain in the air. A car drives up the lane towards us. "Watch this," says Jamie, as she moves directly in front of it. "You watch, the locks'll go straight down."
And of course she's right: as soon as the female Asian driver glimpses the figure of Jamie blocking her way, the windows shoot up and door locks thump down. There's a stand-off for about two minutes; the driver's too scared to get out and confront her and Jamie's enjoying herself too much to bother moving.
It's only when the woman's face tightens into an exasperated scowl, when we see her silently curse and thump the steering wheel, that Jamie gives way. She slowly backs off and, as the terrified driver slams down the accelerator, Jamie leaps onto the footpath and begins to laugh.
Lead-in photograph by James Brickwood.
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