ABSTRACT
In the early 2000s, American teenage girls found themselves in the eye of a substantial media storm, with media commentary portraying them as perpetrators of violent acts of aggression. This storm was triggered in large part by best-selling books such as the Odd Girl Out (Simmons 2002) and Queen Bees and Wannabees (Wiseman 2002), and the movie Mean Girls, as well as a flood of related newspaper articles, but it was paralleled by a flurry of academic psychological research on ‘relational’ or ‘covert’ aggression (Chesney-Lind, Morash and Irwin, 2007: 330). Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, British society was in the midst of its own moral panic over ‘hoodies, knife attacks, gansta rap culture, ASBOs [anti-social behaviour orders], chavs and bling and the rest of it’ (Pearson 2006). Finland, an exemplar of Nordic stability and well-being, was thrown into a youth crisis by the Jokela school shooting incident in 2007 and a second shoot-out in 2008 (Oksanen et al. 2010). These tragedies fuelled a period of intense national soul-searching and debate. Not much later, reports claimed that up to ten million Chinese youngsters were now suffering from ‘web addiction’ (BBC News, 6 August 2009).
