New York's Violence Changes Sex - Tough Girls

NEW YORK - Aida, who was suspended from high school last fall after she threatened to kill her reading teacher, is known as the toughest girl in her neighborhood on the Lower East Side.

She's the one her friends seek out when they need somebody who "really knows how to fight." Like almost all her girlfriends, Aida, 17, always carries a razor blade and can get a gun when she needs it. But thanks to her older brothers, she can handle herself with her fists too.

Aida is now enrolled in a special, year-round school for troubled students in Manhattan. She wants to be a lawyer. But she still gets into street fights with other girls and boys near her home.

The teenager chewed thoughtfully on ketchup-soaked french fries at a McDonald's, pausing occasionally to wash them down with a large Coke, as she described how it feels to stab someone in a fight.

"It's like cutting meat," said Aida, a pretty, stocky girl who wears bright red lipstick and eyeliner on her top lids.

"It's like you start in and you want to keep on stabbing them."

Aida is not an isolated case in the inner-city neighborhoods of New York. Crime and violence is becoming increasingly common among girls. Police statistics show felony arrests of girls has almost doubled over the past five years.

In 1986, 690 girls 17 and under were arrested for felonies. For the first 11 months of 1991, the figure jumped to 1,100.

Aida said the counselors at her new city-funded school program "always ask me how I feel after I hit someone or cut them. I tell them I feel good!"

`IT JUST FEELS GOOD'

"When you're upset it just feels good to get a whole lot of anger out of your system," she added. "I always carry a blade with me. I usually fight clean, but if I see a girl is beating me, I pull it out and cut her."

In recent months, headlines about juvenile mayhem on New York streets have come with a twist: girl gangs, girls jumping each other and girls attacking boys.

Last September, a pack of girls surrounded Maribel Feliciano, 15, on a subway train and demanded her gold hoop earrings. When she refused, one of them stabbed her to death.

In December, a 14-year-old girl from the Borough Park section of Brooklyn fatally stabbed her 15-year-old boyfriend in the heart with a kitchen knife during a fight.

Experts blame the disintegrating family and the escalation of drugs and violence in poor neighborhoods for the increasing toughness of girls.

They say more girls have become involved in selling drugs and, like boys, they often want the kind of material possessions only drug money - or robbery - will get them.

Aida lives at her father's apartment on the Lower East Side during the week and at her mother's place in the South Bronx on the weekends. She says she is not particularly close to either of her parents, both are on welfare. Two of her brothers are in jail.

Even on winter nights during the week, Aida stays out late on the street with her friends. During the February school vacation, she stayed in the South Bronx with a gang of girlfriends.

Her weekend turf is a rough corner in the South Bronx ringed by abandoned buildings, liquor stores and competing drug dealers. Skeletal crack addicts pace nervously down the crumbling sidewalks alongside young mothers pushing strollers.

"We're pretty much troublemakers," she said. "We have a lot of fun in the Bronx. I might move back here full time some day. But I also like my friends on the Lower East Side."

Experts cite a number of reasons why urban girls are becoming more violence-prone than before. Federal funding, after all the ambitious programs of the 1960s, has evaporated in the inner city. The loss of much of the city's manufacturing base, and with it thousands of working-class jobs, has further hastened the breakdown of inner-city families.

"Funding was virtually dismantled in the 1970s and '80s, and that left a tremendous void," said Deborah Baskin, a sociologist at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, who specializes in the study of girls charged with violent crime. "Neighborhoods have lost jobs and role models. Drugs took over. These girls see violence ever present in a way it wasn't in the past."

"They need lots of fancy clothes and jewelry and they're not going to get it sitting in a classroom," Baskin said. "They'll go out and rob someone, just like boys."

But many of the girls themselves do not regard their violent young lives as tragic. Even allowing for ghetto bravado, many of them act as though they sometimes relish it. They speak freely and in detail to a visiting reporter.

Standing outside the high school she attends in Manhattan's gritty Hell's Kitchen, Charmaine rolls up the sleeve of her leather jacket and shows the scar from an old bullet wound as proudly if it were an engagement ring.

Charmaine, 18, giggles with her two friends as she talks about getting shot near her Brooklyn apartment in 1988. All three are wearing makeup, their hair is carefully coiffed and they are sporting expensive, trendy clothes.

"I was just standing around and these friends of mine were shooting at each other. The bullet hit me," Charmaine said. "It was no big deal. I went to the hospital and then I came out."

USUALLY HAVE WEAPONS

But most of the time, Charmaine and her friends make sure they're not victims. They rarely leave their homes without a weapon - razor blades are most popular, but they own guns - and they can handle themselves in fights.

"If you make trouble for me, I'm going to go all out," said Charmaine's friend, Yani, 17, of Brooklyn.

Charmaine, Yani and Tyisha all carry Mace in their bras at school and razor blades, but not guns. "I only carry a .22 automatic when I go out to a party or a movie," Yani said.

Despite the turbulence in their lives, Charmaine maintains a C-plus average in school and Yani and Tyisha both have B averages.

"We're nothin'," Charmaine said. "If you want hard-core girls who'll kill you, go to Brownsville."

Standing on a corner in Brownsville, deep within one of the bleakest sections of Brooklyn, Ivelisse, 13, and her friend, Marja, 15, agree with that assessment.

Ivelisse has a black eye which she says she got in a fight with a boy that ended up as a fight with a girl.

Marja says she always carries a razor "and my boyfriend supplies me with his .32 when I need it.

"I'll use it. If someone's bothering me, I just take it and carry it in my side pocket. I wait for the other person to do what they gotta do and then I do what I gotta do. I hate doing it. But I have to protect myself. I'm not going to let anybody walk over me."