Nicole Beasley, 16, of Providence, shown at the Central High School playing fields, is trying to put fighting behind her and get into college. She says she, like a growing number of girls, has sometimes allowed disagreements with other girls to turn violent.

The Providence Journal / Kris Craig Kris Craig

Sixteen-year-old Nicole Beasley is through with fighting. Almost.

During her middle school years, Nicole tangled quite a bit with other girls, especially when she heard they were talking about her behind her back. Now headed for her senior year at Central High School, in Providence, Nicole says she has a more important goal than proving how tough she is.

Nicole says she is better off without many female friends (“I change my friends like the seasons”) because she is tired of the “he-said, she-said” and back-stabbing that can lead to violence in the world of teenage girls.

“It gets sickening after a while, but you just have to learn not to feed into it,” she says matter-of-factly.

Sitting at the kitchen table in her Wiggin Village apartment, Nicole talks about those middle school battles with wisdom that belies her youth. It’s time to let the “little stuff” go, she says.

“As of now I’m just trying to get into college. That’s all I’m worrying about. I’m not worrying about what the next girl’s saying.”

But she’s not there yet, at least not when it comes to one girl. The two fought twice in the last school year, after the other girl told a mutual friend that Nicole had been talking about her.

“It starts some big old mess, basically, and it ended up with me punching her in her face,” Nicole says. The animosity continued and during a second encounter, the other girl bit Nicole on her back. Nicole admits that for awhile she was looking forward to going to school so she could get even. But the girl hasn’t been around since. While Nicole says she’s “gradually getting over it,” she is still angry about being bitten.

“If I was to see her today, I think that I would want to fight her,” she admits during a chat in mid-June.

NICOLE IS NOT the only girl struggling with teenage violence. In arrest reports, on the playing field, and in the classroom, incidents of young girls fighting are popping up more frequently. Those who work with children — from psychologists and judges to school administrators — say there is a growing trend of adolescent girls who exhibit violent and aggressive behavior toward classmates and adults.

A Jan. 8 brawl involving four 13-year-old girls and two mothers put Woonsocket in the national spotlight — largely because of the mothers’ involvement — and prompted local police and school officials to toughen their stance on school violence.

It also confounded a public unused to such aggressive behavior in what’s still called “the fairer sex.”

School administrators say that not only are fights among girls more frequent than they used to be and more vicious than those involving boys, but the conflicts never end.

“The general consensus is that the fights between girls are far worse,” Woonsocket School Supt. Maureen B. Macera says.

“There’s just much more … drama,” adds Woonsocket Middle School Principal Patrick McGee.

James Garbarino, author of See Jane Hit: Why Girls are Growing More Violent and What Can Be Done About It, says those descriptions are shared by coaches, principals and teachers nationwide.

Figures from the U.S. Justice Department show that 25 years ago, 1 woman for every 10 men was arrested on assault charges. Now it’s 1 woman for every 4 men. The most recent numbers from the department’s Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention also indicate a surge in female violent behavior. In a 2006 national report, the agency said female juvenile violent crime arrests nearly doubled between 1980 and 2003, rising to 18 percent from 10 percent of all juvenile violent crime arrests. The most significant increases were for simple and aggravated assault, the report states.

The trend is evident in Rhode Island. According to Chief Family Court Judge Jeremiah S. Jeremiah Jr., there were 326 juvenile girls arrested last year for assault. Twenty years ago there were only about 50 or 60 cases, he said. The number of cases involving boys, meanwhile, is significantly higher but is increasing at a slower rate. Those cases have gone from over 3,000 cases 20 years ago to nearly 5,000 last year.

Jeremiah attributes the increase, in part, to a change in family values and in the tone of the country.

“It’s just a change in times. Females are more aggressive than before,” he says.

Jeremiah says that most of the simple assault cases he handles in court involving girls stem from conflicts with other girls over boys. The most disturbing incident occurred about six years ago, when a Providence teenager fought another girl over a boyfriend, slicing the girl with a razor from her eyebrow to her lip. The attacker has since been rehabilitated and has gone on to college, he says.

The phenomenon of girls fighting over boys has Jeremiah concerned. “There’s no guy worth getting into trouble over,” he said.

Garbarino, the author, says a number of factors have contributed to the rise of female violence. The overarching theory is that males and females are moving closer to each other in terms of behavior and social experiences. Boys and girls are equally aggressive in infancy, but girls are traditionally socialized to repress violent or aggressive behavior. Boys, through wrestling with their fathers and general rough-housing, often get early lessons on how to manage and channel aggression.

“For girls, the uniform message was ‘girls don’t hit,’ period. Boys learned who to hit and where to hit,” he says.

Those messages are now changing as television and movies more frequently depict females who fight, and as more girls participate in sports. Over time, the genders are becoming more even in how they express aggression and handle conflicts, and that behavior shift is also evident in sexual behavior and athleticism, Garbarino asserts.

“The bigger picture, I think, is there’s a generalized shift to release the physicality of girls generally,” he says.

And when girls do fight, according to Garbarino, it tends to be for completely different reasons from those of boys. Boy-fights are reactionary and easily extinguished. Two boys get in a fight while playing basketball, the coach tells them to stop fighting and shake hands, and the game resumes.

Girl-fights, generally speaking, result from long-simmering personal conflicts that balloon until they involve several other girls, he says.

Girl-fights, while on the rise, are still unusual enough to make headlines, he says. A female exhibiting behavior outside her traditional gender role makes her somewhat of a sideshow. Her actions are exaggerated in the eyes of the public.

In the Woonsocket case, had it been a father taking his son to school to fight other boys, it would not have been as big a deal as it was when a mother took her daughter to fight, he observes. It’s not unusual for fathers to encourage sons to stand up for themselves. “It’s applying to girls a lot of the culture that’s applied to boys, and that’s the shocking element,” Garbarino says.

News reports of the middle school melee traveled as far west as California and also were picked up by Spanish-language news broadcasts in Puerto Rico. In Rhode Island, those appalled or stunned by the fighting mothers and daughters debated the incident in local newspapers, on the radio and online.

There’s no research to suggest that the fighting-moms phenomenon is becoming a national or even a statewide trend, but the outrage is evident. Reached the day of the Jan. 8 fight, Principal McGee said “disappointed” did not do justice to describing his reaction to the “so-called adults” who engaged in fighting with their daughters.

Superintendent Macera, who calls the youth violence problem “systemic,” hopes to bring in professionals trained in the use of nonviolence techniques to work with teachers on better ways to resolve disputes. She also wants to expand the district’s adult-education program to provide parenting and conflict-resolution classes.

But Adrian Cox, Nicole Beasley’s mother, says that mothers getting involved in their daughters’ fights is nothing new. On numerous occasions, Cox says she’s called other Providence mothers to resolve conflicts involving their daughters. “Next thing you know this woman’s coming to my door and confronting me!” she says.

In one particularly disturbing instance, the mother of one of Nicole’s classmates pressured her daughter to fight three other girls and even coordinated the event. “It was like the mother wasn’t going to be satisfied until this was done,” Cox says.

Woonsocket Middle School Principal McGee and Vice Principal Linda Kuras say they don’t know for sure what’s causing the increase in violent behavior among young girls, but girls do get into more conflicts that require mediation than boys.

“I think it’s a combination between the age and girls not being as able to let things go,” Kuras says.

Kuras, an eighth-grade administrator, has been involved in many attempts to mediate disputes. She says the conflicts normally involve a complicated web of “friends.” Some girl says something behind another girl’s back, other girls get involved and fan the flames, pressuring the girls to fight.

If the conflict leads to violence during the school year, the guilty parties are ordered to Kuras’ office for mediation. Tension is diffused, but often some combination of the earlier groups ends up back in her office with a new conflict.

“They’re more complicated and more detailed and take longer,” Kuras says of disagreements involving girls.

Boy-fights are more spontaneous. A disparaging comment suddenly turns good-natured trash-talking into fighting, for example. “They’re reactionary, they’re not as developed, and they don’t take as long,” Kuras says.

McGee says the confrontational behavior seems to cross all ethnic and socioeconomic groups. While an administrator in the nearly all-white Coventry school system, he had to diffuse plenty of conflicts among girls.

Words are often exchanged between the two camps on the girls’ MySpace pages, another troubling trend facing school administrators. Superintendent Macera guesses that the popular social networking Web site is responsible for 90 percent of adolescent conflicts. “It’s probably even bigger than we’re aware of,” McGee says.

BACK IN Wiggin Village, Cox, 48, recalls that she, too, was bullied by other girls and had to fight to defend herself. Cox also went to Central, where she was a cheerleader and her mother was a teacher. Some people thought that Cox acted as though she were better than other students. But the violence was never as bad as that which Nicole and her friends face every day, she says.

Now, with the availability of weapons, she says, there is a thin line between a run-of-the-mill schoolyard fight and teen tragedy.

“In my day, OK, you got your behind whooped; it’s over. Not now.” Cox says she tells her daughter no fight is worth her life or her looks.

Setting her sights on college, Nicole is trying to move beyond disputes. “Fighting’s not going to pay my tuition,” she says.

Nicole is enrolled this summer in College Visions, a course to help low-income teens get accepted into college. She is looking at the University of Connecticut, the University of Massachusetts, Syracuse University and the University of North Carolina. Nicole wants to major in business administration and communications, and to eventually own her own business or become a sports reporter on cable television.

But it’s a long road from here to there, and there’s pressure on every side to fall back into her old ways.

Before school ended in June, a new group of girls started talking about Nicole and giving her dirty looks. Nicole has no idea why they targeted her.

“If that had happened in middle school, I would have fought all of them,” she says.

Now, Nicole laughs at their attempts to rile her. Avoiding conflicts is all part of growing up, and they’re obviously not on her maturity level, she says.

“I can’t be mad at them because I was just like them.”

khayes@projo.com