The grim image etched into my memory by a Channel 4 documentary on tonight is of two very young women staggering down a dark street, skirts riding up above their knickers, their legs splayed and buckling beneath them, while the police attempt to help them walk.
One of the injured women featured in tonight’s documentary
Eventually, one girl falls against a lamp post and collapses, so drunk she cannot carry her own weight, as one woman police officer says, helplessly, incredulously: ‘I’m like a mother to them all. Don’t they know the dangers?’
The central focus of this shocking, despairing documentary shot with the emergency services in Blackpool is that the gravest danger facing young girls, right here in Britain, right now in 2012, is not from a stranger or a violent partner, but from themselves.
A woman wearing a leopard print dress has been taken into an ambulance after drinking too much
More young women than ever are deliberately crippling themselves with binge drinking, putting themselves in real peril by fighting and carrying knives, and using their fists and foul language as offensive weapons.
And I have to ask, echoing that police officer and speaking as a mother of daughters myself, where are the mothers of these loutish, brutalised girls?
These extremely young women seem so determined to self-destruct that it makes me wonder if they ever had a loving role model — namely, their own mother.
Two women are walking home from a night out, one of them barefoot, holding her heels, whilst a fellow reveller has sat down in the street
While so many girls work hard, achieve, support good causes and fill their families with pride, why do these others fill the city streets at night, cluttering up our police cells, our ambulances and accident and emergency departments, existing as nothing but living, breathing symbols of ‘broken Britain’?
Is it because they have been brought up to believe themselves to be so utterly valueless that they numb themselves with huge quantities of strong drink, spending £100 a night if they have it, drinking ten or 12 glasses of ‘Jager Bomb’ until they vomit or pass out and have to be rescued?
Is it because they witnessed so much violence in their young lives that it seems natural to them to stab or punch, and assault the police threatening ‘I’ll kill both of you’, ‘f***ing pigs’, and ‘I’m going to rip your f***ing head off’.
A woman in a sequined top is taken by police during a night out in Blackpool
One officer, appalled but resigned, blames our celebrity culture. Teenagers automatically resent and reject parental discipline. Instead, it’s cool to copy ‘celebrity’ role models.
A police officer in the programme said if we want to blame anyone for the behaviour of the girls they arrest: ‘Blame the Spice Girls.’
But that’s not fair, Girl Power is not at fault. The achievements of Spice Girls Victoria Beckham, Melanie Chisholm and the rest demonstrate that genuine Girl Power depends on talent and hard work.
So don’t blame the Spice Girls. Blame the flock of dishevelled, inarticulate, talentless wannabees, addicted to drink, drugs and violence, who define fun as being photographed regularly falling in and out of gutters.
They have become the role models for a tragic generation of young women who totter after them, and destroy themselves in the process.
Most shocking is the violence perpetrated by some of these girls. They don’t just hurt themselves, they injure others.
Read more: MailOnline
