Why More Girls are Getting Arrested
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When 16-year old twins Tasmiyah and Jasmiyah Whitehead were arrested earlier this year for murdering their mother, family friends seemed hardly surprised. The mother’s boyfriend, Robert Head, speculated the girls killed their mom for money. A neighbor, Angela Avery, said the mom lived in fear of her daughters. In police photos the twins look particularly mean. And news reports have, in many ways, already convicted the girls although they have yet to be tried. Their arrests have raised the question in local and national media of whether girls, particularly teens, are becoming more violent. Ironically, rates of murder by girls are at their lowest levels in forty years -- but lately the number of female juvenile delinquents has exploded.