Let’s not get carried away. Girls are still in the minority where violence is concerned. The simple fact is that the more angry, feral children there are on the streets, the more likely that some of them will be girls. There is no mass movement of uncontrollable harpies with knives in their thongs, though a few male fantasists will talk up the idea with relish.

But there is cultural change, visible within a generation. The idea of a “gentler” sex has ever-less currency in the entertainment we get and the heroines we are offered, whether it is musclebound Madonna looking as if she’s been training with the SAS, or Gail and Eileen brawling on the cobbles and Tracey braining her lover with a brass Madonna-and-child statuette down Coronation Street. Soap women always quarrelled, but in gentler times it was just hairnets at dawn and glaring over the back fence.

And it needn’t be physical (note the ball-breaking style favoured by women on The Apprentice, and the outbreaks of dreadful stroppiness in she-columnists such as this one). If female verbal and professional aggression becomes commonplace, as it probably had to while society evened out the unfair old playing field of gender, I suppose some of it inevitably was going to turn physical when the ideology seeped down to the dimmer and drunker of the young populace.

For the soap warriors are following, rather than leading: out on the real streets for some time it has been apparent that some girls are forswearing the traditional role of screaming, “leave it, he’s not wurf it!” in favour of weighing in, or starting their own fights, especially when drunk. The word “feisty” is used with total approval, and feist mutates easily into fist.

But caution: as Dr Arnull points out, some of the figures point only to the new powerlessness of teachers and readiness to involve the police in what in more robust times would have been dealt with on the spot. The adult terror of sexual allegations obviously makes it less attractive to wade in and grab them by the scruff. We should not overreact. Yet, as you pick your way between screaming, weeping, quarrelling girls on any Friday night in any British town centre, and meditate on the grievous misunderstanding of the word “respect” in a chippy generation terrified of powerlessness, and watch the police standing by nervously and the boys apparently unmoved by the girls’ self-abandonment, you have to see a link between that new disinhibition and the occasional decision by a girl to use a knife or a fist to get what she wants. Stigma, alas, had its uses...

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