I must admit I was a little startled by the report in March of a 15-year-old girl who was beaten in an area school cafeteria.

Apparently, the girl's head was slammed on the floor a few times.

A week later, the victim ended up in Parkview Hospital. A couple holes were drilled in her head to relieve pressure on her brain. She lapsed into a coma for three days.

By now she has been removed from a respirator and the drainage tubes have been removed from her head.

She's on the mend now, but is going to need quite a bit of therapy to fully recover.

Frankly, it seems pretty bizarre to me. I wondered what would prompt one girl to perpetrate that level of violence on another girl.

Then I saw an Associated Press story out of Baltimore.

"A 12-year-old girl is out of a coma but still struggling to recover after being pummeled and stomped at a birthday party in a beating that was shocking not just because of its savagery, but because it was meted out by other girls," AP reported.

The story went on to explain that the beating came about after a boy at the birthday party kissed the girl on the cheek. The other kids at the party erupted into laughter and the mother of theÊbirthday girl apparently was offended. The boy, you see, was supposed to be her daughter's boyfriend.

Remember, these kids are 12.

What ensued stretches the limits of human logic.

The mother urged her daughter to "handle your business." Police said that meant the daughter had to defend the family's honor.

The victim was scratched, beaten, kicked and stomped by as many as six girls, according to the cops. She was in a coma for nearly three weeks and is still hospitalized. Her family said she may have permanent brain damage. Charged were the birthday girl, 13; her sister, 19; and three other girls, ages 13, 14 and 15.

But what really took me aback was what the cops and other officials told the reporter.

"We're seeing girls doing things now that we used to put off on boys," former Baltimore school Police Chief Jansen Robinson said. "This is vicious, 'I-want-to-hurt-you' fighting. It's a nationwide phenomenon and it's catching us all off guard."

Other authorities told AP this is a symptom of a disturbing trend around the country: Girls are turning to violence more often and with chilling intensity.

Call it the "Girls Gone Wild" syndrome.

Around the nation, school officials, cops and teachers are finding themselves in the middle of fights in which girls are going at each other with clenched fists, just like boys.

Nationally, violence among teen boys - as measured by arrest statistics and surveys - still outstrips violence by girls by a 4-to-1 margin. But a generation ago, it was 10-to-1, AP reported.

The big question is why?

And I suppose there are a million reasons. Experts point to a few of the more obvious ones.

Society in general has become more violent and less civil.

Then there's the breakdown of the family, the church, the community.

(What that we were to pray in school or gaze upon a monument of the Ten Commandments? That certainly would send us down the wrong path as a nation. Better to constitutionally prohibit anything virtuous and constitutionally protect all things vile and lecherous.)

And of course the violence in films and videogames that portrays women every bit as violent as their male counterparts.

And the AP quoted Phil Leaf, director of the Center for the Prevention of Youth Violence at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.

He said nobody should have been surprised by the surge in girl violence.

"In retrospect, we can see girls falling prey to the same influences as boys. ... A decade or so ago, we were worried about the lack of male role models in the home. Today, there is a dearth of effective female role models as the mothers who used to be there are forced back into the job market or get rendered ineffective through abuse of drugs and alcohol."

Leaf told AP the situation in Baltimore and other cities reminds him of the William Golding novel "Lord of the Flies": "We're seeing the effects of children growing up in a world without adults."

You see, this is probably one of the more scary sociological developments I've witnessed in my lifetime.

It's scary because, well, wait a minute. I am treading in treacherous waters here. All my feminist friends are going to accuse me of being sexist and tossing around stereotypes.

But here goes.

It's scary because women are supposed to be the level-headed ones. Women are supposed to be the ones that sympathize and empathize. The nurturers. The caregivers. The ones with feelings. The ones who keep peace.

They provide the balance that society needs to overcome all that testosterone driven machismo out there.

Women should be the keepers of virtue. They should be dragging men - kicking and screaming - away from their callousness and insensitivity toward a kinder, gentler existence.

Hey, for years I've heard feminists say that the world would be a better place if men were more like women.

So what's happening? Women are becoming more like men.

I can't imagine that making the world a better place. [[In-content Ad]]