a)     

There had been a spike in October 2024 in which there were a number of girls committing violent offences which had almost doubled from 20% or the whole cohort of children pre-pandemic to 38.5% in October 2024;

b)     

Since October 2024, the Youth Justice service had worked with 19 girls and their families and carers whose offending was violent in nature. Much of the violence was outside of the home appeared to be pre-meditated in nature, being uploaded to social media;

c)     

Of the 19 girls that had worked with the service, only one had re-offended;

d)     

It had taken time to build trusting relationships with those young women to understand the reasons for the violence which had been predominately as a result of peer pressure;

e)     

To prevent other children following a similar pattern we realised that we needed to raise awareness in schools and the council had commissioned youth workers from Plymouth Argyle Trust to engage with groups in schools;

f)      

Violence involving boys had seen a 6% year on year decrease with the majority of violence involving them being linked to exploitation through county lines;

g)     

Child female violence had increased in all local authorities in Devon and Cornwall which mirrored a national picture. The council therefore continued to work with schools to educate children of the consequences of violence.

Question:

When we were discussing this the other week we felt like there was a lot of ambiguity with what was being said and we didn’t really quite understand. Can we have more detail around the numbers so we can understand the issues better. What were the levels of seriousness of the offences and how many of the 19 girls were against strangers and filmed for social media?

Response:

There was evidence of 11 offences that were uploaded to social media including Telegram to closed groups which were invite only. Of those 11 assaults on strangers which were filmed in various locations across the city. In terms of seriousness of those offences, there was grievous bodily harm down to physical harm of the victims receiving cuts and bruises.

An example was shared of 15 girls attacking three girls in Drakes Circus all of which didn’t know one another. The attack was premeditated and the girls had setup three points of view to record the assaults.

It was known that other assaults happened based on differing schools.

Question:

What were the numbers of girls like when compared to boys in the city. The report didn’t specify the rates of male violence which was happening at a higher rate than female violence.

Response:

There had been a spike in the numbers of girls coming through the system than ever before. The numbers of boys committing violent offences had dropped by 6% and a lot of the violence had been orchestrated by adults where there had been drugs involved. It was noted that the service had a good grip on boy violence which was mirrored through the police data.

There were 46 boys open to the service for violent offences and there would be 11 girls with the service at the end of February as a number of their order would’ve concluded. 38% of boys open to the service re-offended with violence.

Question:

What are Plymouth Argyle going to be doing in the work with young people and how were they going to be helping involve young people in the process?

Response:

Plymouth Argyle Trust had 120 youth workers employed who were both male and female offering a wide range of programmes including sporting interventions, behaviour work and working with families. It had taken a long time to build trusting relationships with young people due to a lack of trust in the police and youth justice workers when we come in and ask questions. We were hoping to utilise the skills of the youth workers from Plymouth Argyle to go into schools and raise awareness of the consequences of what happens to these girls when they do these offences. The service was confident that the interventions were being rectified which showed in the re-offending data, but the aim was to get in their earlier with schools.

Question:

What are you doing to look at the root causes and see if you need to involve more services around intervention and prevention and what else was being done to help these girls?

Response:

Around offending there was a lot of support around them and indeed the victims who had been assaulted also get a lot of support. As this was a new and developing picture it was thought it was better to involve Plymouth Argyle. There was a spike nationally and there were interventions run in London but there were no accredited programmes for girl on girl violence. Plymouth was working with the Youth Justice Board to address this.

Trevi house have been involved since the start and this topic was raised at the Safer Executive meeting which met quarterly. They had seen the spikes as well for the young women at Trevi House.

Plymouth had seen the spike which had started to go down, but we couldn’t be complacent around that and we need to continue to build a picture and work with other agencies.

h)     

There had been huge difficulty in influencing national organisations to remove platforms where the violence was being shared;

i)      

A social worker was doing great work around female empowerment to help steer girls away from peer pressure environments;

j)      

The Youth Justice service was able to offer the same level of support to victims as to those that were the perpetrators for the first time as a result of additional funding received;

k)     

It was recognised that some of the girls instigating the violence were the ones that were recording, but were not subject to prosecution in this country;

l)      

The Targeted support service aimed to intervene with children at an earlier age to prevent their behaviour escalating into something that was criminal.