Word: bovver
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...game suffers more than it ever did from its bloodied-oaf aficionados-the rough, vulgar, vandalistic, stupid, even murderous. British supporters have become notorious for their train ripping, window smashing, bovver booting, bottle fights. Recent British fan conduct in Holland led to Times editorials and high-level apologies on behalf of the whole British nation. Volatile Latins, though less ebullient than the stolid Anglo-Saxons, have been known to bite ears off referees...
Muggings Up. In a more recent case, two teen-agers viciously kicked and beat up a 22-year-old girl in a toilet during a football game. Last month three bovver birds were sentenced to up to two years each in reform school for pulling a 25-year-old schoolteacher to the ground at a west London bus stop and kicking her until her face was covered with blood. "The girls are even tougher than the boys," said one judge at Old Bailey last week. "It was once assumed that if a man and a woman committed a crime...
...female teeny-bashers are harder to catch than their male counterparts. They are seldom seen swaggering, boasting or clustering in gangs, and they affect no distinctive style of dress or appearance. Male criminals generally are products of the poorer sections of London, but some of the bovver birds come from such tony neighborhoods as Kensington, Knightsbridge and Chelsea...
Brenda is typical of the bovver birds. "They seem very unmoved by it all, very detached," says a probation officer. "Many of their attacks are for pure game, mostly done on the spur of the moment." Says Trevor Gibbens, forensic psychiatrist at the University of London and the author of several research studies of girl offenders: "Girls who used to grow up in relatively sheltered homes now freely roam the streets just like the boys have always done. It is a natural result that, in becoming equal, they have become equal in all areas, including violence...
...caught. "It's like talking to someone of another race," says one officer. "We don't really know when to yell at them, threaten or go gently. We just don't know much, that's all." The fear among some policemen is that the bovver birds, more adept at disguise than male street gangs, and appearing less threatening, will eventually become more proficient than men in the way of violent crime...