Knives, bottles, hammers, bats, sticks and rocks are age-old instruments of violence when one human being wants to do damage to another.

References to stabbing, slashing, punching, kicking and brawling which leads to bleeding, bruising, scarring and other trauma in our fellow citizens are almost so commonplace today that they no longer alarm the average reader of a daily newspaper.

With a spate of recent incidents in which these weapons are being wielded - and these injuries inflicted - by Bermuda's teen girls against one other, shock and dismay is rising in the community.

The first attack to draw media attention saw a 16-year-old girl stabbed by two other teens on Front Street just prior to New Year.

The girl lost four pints of blood and was hospitalised for four days. The two attackers have now been charged with the indictable crime of assault causing bodily harm.

Before the shock of the first attack could be numbed, five girls attacked another teenager en masse outside her Jones' Village home on January 3.

One week later, three girls pounced on a 17-year-old in playground near her home.

The teens beat their victim with a baseball bat and she sustained serious injuries and swelling to her face.

The attack was believed to be in retaliation for the January 3 incident.

While these events are shocking to the public at large, teen girls themselves are more blas about the occurrences.

Girls told The Royal Gazette they had seen other girls come to blows at school, outside school grounds, in their neighbourhoods and at social events.

"Girls are as likely to fight nowadays as boys," one 17-year-old said. "Girls are fed up and aren't going to take anymore."

The catalysts most often attributed to these fights were spats and jealousy over boys.

The prevalence and increasing vehemence of fighting over boys comes as no surprise to Police officers who are often called to the front lines of battles between teen girls.

"More often than not if two girls get into a fight, it's because of a boy," Det. Con. Hataya DeSilva of the Police Child and Juvenile Services unit said.

In the course of her 12 years as an officer, Det. Con. DeSilva said she has seen girls as young as 13 involved in physical brawls with their peers.

"One girl had a big, gash over her eye and brow. I've seen blackened eyes and scratched up faces," she added.

Det Const. DeSilva said the injuries she seen teen girls inflict on one another to date have been less serious than what she's seen adults do to one another.

She admits, with the spiralling rate of violence among the girls, the possibility of more serious incidents and even violent death is real.

"I'd hate to think that could actually be the case though," she said.

Interacting with teen girls with violent streaks on a daily basis, Det. Con. DeSilva said the girls seem to be devoid of remorse or fear of possible repercussion for their behaviour.

It's a stark change from the Bermuda she grew up in, she adds.

"There is a rise a violence in younger women," Det. Con. DeSilva said. "It's noticeable because Bermuda used to be a society where girls were taught to be ladies.

"But girls are stepping outside that character and fighting like animals."

Det. Con. DeSilva and others say the increasing violence being exhibited by Bermuda's teen girls is indicative of a changing society characterise by plummeting levels of interpersonal respect and tolerance.

The girls are becoming more aggressive, more disrespectful and more fearless than once thought imaginable.

More shocking even than the fury, violence or the lack of remorse on the part of the girls, Det. Con. DeSilva said however, is the degree of sexual experience very young teenagers in Bermuda have.

"The way the young girls talk about sex - they are far too knowledgeable for 13 or 14 years old. The things they say shock me," she said.

"They are losing their innocence at a younger age and it is more apparent every day."

Being involved in intense sexual relations with boys before there is any real emotional maturity is probably leading to many of these explosive fights between girls, she said.

They are thrust in rivalry situations with one another and the boys seem to get a kick out of the magnitude of jealousy and anger they are able create.

"They certainly aren't telling these girls 'don't be fighting over me'," Det. Con. DeSilva said of the boys at the centre of the emotional chaos.

The girls who are fighting cross all Bermuda's economic and social lines, she added, although more girls who attended Government schools told The Royal Gazette they personally had witnessed girls fighting than those who attended private schools.

Determining the trigger which makes one girls turn to violence where another would not is a tricky puzzle.

According to psychologist Dr. Carol Shuman, girls may get involved in physical fights in an effort to prove themselves in the only arena they see open to them.

"A subordinate group will fight among itself for power," she said. "They may not be competing on economic, social or educational levels for whatever reason, but they will compete with each other for what is left."

Chairperson of the Family Resource Network Sheelagh Cooper said a web of factors including poverty, exposure to domestic violence, changing cultural and social norms, drugs and media glorification of violence can all play a role in rising expressions of physical violence among Bermuda's girls.

The fighting does not tend to be an expression of random violence, however.

What Bermuda is seeing is an increasing willingness to resort to violence when teen girls are involved in situations which would have been thorny and highly emotional situations in any case, Ms Cooper said.

Very rarely are Police finding incidents of random violence of one girl or group of girls against another, Det Const. DeSilva agreed. "It's usually two people who are fighting with one another."

The thorny situations may exacerbated by the presence of a girl's friends.

Friends may exert peer pressure on the girls to fight, forcing aggressors to substantiate what might otherwise have been limited to false bravado.

But while some observers have told The Royal Gazette girls may be forming into gangs, Det. Con. DeSilva said she has yet to see evidence of girl gangs.

"Girls might be associated with gangs such as the White Wall gang," she said. "But they are not necessarily starting their own."

Tomorrow: One teen girls tells her story of how years of fighting with one of her peers eventually culminated in a stabbing.