I used to work security at gigs during college (on everything from heavy metal to classical) and teenage girl band stuff had it's own set of challenges.

One was noise, tens of thousands of screaming girls when you are standing at the front was incredibly loud, I'm not exaggerating when I say it was painfully uncomfortable - even with double hearing protection. Way worse than a metal gig. Way worse than even standing on the flight line as a fighter takes off. Something about the pitch would make my ears ring for a week after a teenage girl concert - I stopped doing it because of the damage I know it was causing.

Fainting was also a huge problem, both people faking it and to try and get lifted over the barrier (and promptly escorted out, so I never got why they bothered) and also people just genuinely fainting. When it happened at other gigs it was usually a highly localised crowd push (very rare as that we always on the lookout for) or heat/lack of water/drugs/medical. But at a teenage girls gig that was never an issue really, it was essentially just something I feel might be described as hysteria. It was the only gigs where you would see like a genuine mass fainting phenomenon. Sort of like a specific group of friends and people nearby would whip themselves up into mass hysteria and then over they go. Kind of how I imagine cults are or those odd Christian preacher churches in the US. Other things I just found odd. I was maybe 18 when I started doing this and there were often huge amounts of women only sometimes a year or two younger than me crying their eyes out all night, wetting themselves or other odd stuff. Very surreal.

Crowds near the artists was always a tricky. I worked at lots of gigs with crazy fans (metal heads etc) but teenage girls had this mass sort of strange thing where if they got near the artists they would sort of grab, paw, pull, scrape the artists at times. Which if you have a dozen all doing it at the same time is super dangerous. Understandably artists were really dam scared of it. All it takes is one to start pulling at lanyard or scarf round the neck and you'd have issues. Plus for the bigger artists were nearly certain that there would be a big group of them outside the crew/artist hotel screaming day and night. Similarly you have the risk of just an overwhelming mob happening and especially in an environment where they are young women, you are understandably more limited in the actions you can take to stop and restrain them from jumping barriers etc.

Then there are the other issues - alcohol, well that's just stuff that's a problem everywhere. But there was a huge amount of attempts by crews and artists to take advantage of some of the younger, more nieve teenagers not realizing the consequences of what they were getting into. Often if you were controlling access to backstage you would actually be as much protecting young women for their own safety being brought back stage as you were the artists. You would get offered anything and everything by young women looking to get back stage. Very uncomfortable position to be in. Parents were often just as unhelpful and would encourage shitty behaviour.

Also it wasn't always teenage women, some of the bands had older women in their 20s/30s/40s just as obsessed. Having worked tons of crazy gigs with often huge fights one of the only times I was left badly bleeding was at a teenage girl band because of an obsessive woman in her 40s trying to get back stage. She wasn't on drugs but seemed possessed like I never have seen before. It was totally manic. She had gotten into her head that she wanted to go backstage to the artists and that was that - she was willing to use weapons, nails, rings, glass to do that. When she was arrested after she was practically sober, well spoken, in a sort of daze and I think pretty genuinely not sure about what had happened. Something I never saw from guys who wanted to go back stage. Most of them just tried their luck and if told (or gently helped) to leave would realise it wasn't gonna happen and left. Of course that's all purely an anicdote and men are far far more likely to have dangerous obsessions about famous and non famous people.

Unfortunately you learn the hard way in such a situation that it is very very difficult as a guy to fight a crazed women in that situation. Teenage girls would also generally I found would be the first to try to lash out and attack you. Also they tend to wear more rings, bracelets etc and drink spirits from glass (beer usually in plastic) so getting cut by them was more likely than with a similar aged boy. Teenage boys and drunk men would of course try but are much more pack animals and rarely would strike out at you out of the blue - they new the consequences against a group of security guys weren't great. I sometimes felt like teenage girls felt they could get away with it more. Also teenage boys would often try to save face by striking out and punching if they were getting kicked out, whereas teenage girls would often try to save face by making a false allegation. So for example if you were pulling teenage girls out of the front barrier for some safety reason you _always_ needed a (ideally female) witness there to back you up (even though there's obviously loads anyway). It's not easy to cleanly and safely lean over to pull a ten stone (often dead weight) woman passing out over a barrier.

In general we always found men were more dangerous but more compliant, esp with alcohol involved. Trying to get a big bunch of rowdy drinking guys to move away from a fire door was always much easier than a big group of rowdy women. We could never figure it out but I think a lot of us thought that was a self policing thing, guys more likely to tell a friend being an asshole or move it or let the person get on with their job. It didn't help if you were male or female security, female security definitely got more crap from other women than from men. The natural inclination to hold back really gets you cut up. A guy is so much simpler.

Full on fights were had between security and some of the (often big name) artists crews at times to stop them bringing young underage women backstage. We're talking 13 year old girls who and dressed up to make themselves look 15/16 sort of thing. Some crews and artists were notorious for it. I remember for example one rappers crew bringing in underage women that they had met somewhere the day before in the city and had given them backstage passes to the gig. They tried to bring them back afterwards and caused absolute murder with us, then bringing in the production people to tell us to overlook it, then the venue people (all while the girls of course were screaming at us to let them through), only we were stubborn Irish and got the cops to wander over and make their presence felt it would have gotten nasty. Those were only the ones we could protect and in the venue were we prided ourselves on running a tight ship, when it came to the artists traveling "security team" I'm not so sure the same ethics applied.

That's not saying gigs with teenage boys didn't also have challenges. They certainly did, especially with booze. But in many ways these were a little easier - everyone trying to kick the crap out of each other is a lot easier to manage in way.

Don't get me wrong, I think young people and teenagers are awesome, they give me great hope for the future. But they sure as hell can be weird when in a pack (I know I was when younger!).