Sponsored by
How safe is our city with girls behaving badly?
This time last week a group of friends were looking forward to a night out in Sheffield, but the evening turned to tragedy when 23-year-old Helen Hay was stabbed to death in Carver Street. Two days later three men were stabbed in another Sheffield nightclub brawl. Lucy Harvey finds out are we Safe in the City?
IT'S 10.40pm in Sheffield city centre and dozens of people are avoiding a heap on the ground in Carver Street.
The heap is a young woman sitting next to a pool of her own vomit, too drunk to see, stand... or care.
Just 25 yards along the street is another heap - a pile of floral tributes to young murder victim Helen Hay, knifed to death days earlier.
Alarmingly very few passers-by seem to note the significance of the shrine and a queue to get into the Flares bar soon hides the public display of grief.
Inside the late-night bar, where the argument which led to murder is alleged to have started, people push and shove their way around without a thought for each other.
One man barges through a group of women celebrating a birthday sending bottles flying.
As the culprit tries to apologise, a woman also goes flying, having lost a private battle between balance and booze.
She ends up helpless on her hands and knees, her contemporaries looking on in disgust.
If it was the middle of the day someone would have helped, but this is the middle of the night when rules of social etiquette go dancing out of the door, as a hapless man finds out to his cost.
As he desperately tries to co-ordinate his feet on the dancefloor he accidentally steps on a woman's toe.
The so-called lady rewards his clumsiness with a filthy look, two-fingered salute and abusive warning not to do it again.
The man shuffles off, embarrassed by his behaviour - and hers.
But she is not alone. Throughout the evening grown women continually behave like yobs, giving each other catty looks, shoving each other out of the way and making their obnoxious presences known.
Bio-chemistry graduate Gregg Bingham believes women's behaviour is deteriorating. The 22-year-old, of Wincobank, said: "Women are definitely getting worse. You never used to hear about woman fighting."
Nin Poignie, a 20-year-old mortgage advisor from Broomhall, agrees: "I work in a bar at night and there is loads of trouble in our place, I have had to break up fights between girls before," she said.
"They seem to be getting drunk more, they are more crude than they used to be and mouth off a lot more. There is a lot more attitude."
Nin thinks more searches should be introduced in bars and clubs, for men and women.
She said: "I think girls should be stopped and searched as much as lads, you should not assume they are the fairer sex anymore.
"A lot of places don't search girls and these days it is getting worse, there is a lot more bitch fighting."
Teacher Faye Burtenshaw, aged 22, of Broomhill, believes metal detectors could provide a solution.
She said: "I would not mind being checked if it meant people felt safer on the whole but it might be a bit impractical in every bar because of the queues. A lot of places have metal detectors, maybe that is the answer." Research scientist Lee Borthwick, aged 23, of Ecclesall Road, agrees. He said: "If people are content to take knives out with them they are doing it for a reason and need to be stopped."
Back at Flares the birthday group celebrate with a fishbowl cocktail, two girls discard their high-heeled shoes and collapse onto the floor while another woman uses her 'I am 50' birthday badge as a passport to kiss teenage boys.
Outside, tempers are fraying. Just before 2am two men fight on Division Street as a petite blonde tries to divide them, and on Pinstone Street a shoe-less thug is pinned to the floor by police, arrested and carted off in a police van after a punch-up.
Trouble is also brewing outside Republic where men exchange blows, while outside Flares a man remonstrates with a police woman - ignorant of the poignant floral tributes beside him.
Nikki Locke, a student from Hillsborough, who says she was the victim of an assault by a woman in a city centre pub, admits she is more careful about her own safety than she used to be.
The 22-year-old said: "You hear about that sort of thing all the time but when it is in the city centre where you go all the time it does affect you. You don't want to drink as much and it puts you off places.
"I am much more wary now. I don't like going to the toilets on my own and if I bump into someone or they bump into me I will make a point of apologising just in case - that's how some of these things start."
However draftsman Philip Murphy, aged 43, of Sothall, does not think violence is getting any worse.
He said: "There always has been and there always will be violence. Unfortunately these days there are weapons involved and you are going to get deaths.
"The police have a difficult job, they are never going to do it 100 per cent, but they do as best they can."
n Louise Giles, aged 19, has been charged with the murder of Helen Hay. Giles, of no fixed abode, has been remanded in custody and is due at Sheffield Crown Court on Friday.
Anyone with information should call police on 0114 220 2020.
Email to a friend
Print this page
Looking for...
Featured advertisers
Jobs
Search for a job
Motors
Search for a car
Property
Search for a house
Weather for Sheffield
Saturday 26 May 2012
Today
Sunny
Temperature: 9 C to 21 C
Wind Speed: 18 mph
Wind direction: East
Tomorrow
Sunny
Temperature: 11 C to 21 C
Wind Speed: 14 mph
Wind direction: East
