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Jane Hanson
Anyone who teaches junior high school knows that for some girls Grade 7 is an emotional rollercoaster filled with tears, drama, daily crises and popularity races, and that academics can become an inconvenience that cuts into students' social lives.
Nothing can cause a teacher to crash land in September faster than the tears and distress of Grade 7 girls during the first weeks of school. The skirmishes among the previous year's Grade 6 girls have the potential of turning into a full-scale war in Grade 7.
Over the years of my varied junior high teaching experience, bullying by and among girls seems to have increased, and girls have become increasingly aggressive. Boys have bullying issues, too, but their behaviour is blatantly physical. Girls tend to be more covert when bullying their peers. Girls abuse each other while pretending to be best friends; such behaviour often goes undetected by school staff and parents.
For the Grade 7 teachers at our school, the 2006/07 school year was particularly explosive, and some girls in our classrooms made life miserable for themselves and those around them. In the first few days of school, we were shocked by the number of girls reduced to tears. We didn't detect anything amiss in our classrooms, but note passing, whispering and nonverbal gesturing were taking place. Putting out fires among girls became our main pastime and scrubbing denigrating graffiti from washroom stalls seemed to become a full-time job for the schools' caretakers.
One illustrative example took place in the girls' locker room at our school. A usually bubbly and cheerful student arrived at my colleague's class after gym—the student's head was down and her eyes were filled with tears. The student had left her gym T-shirt in the locker room and when she returned to get it, she found that someone had torn it almost in half in a clear attempt to demean and torment her. To their credit, the victimized student's classmates collected money and, much to the girl's surprise, bought her a new T-shirt. The students' actions showed empathy for the victim, though empathy is a quality that many adolescents lack. A lack of empathy is a hallmark of a bully.
Another incident involved some Grade 9 girls who were being subjected to verbal abuse by some of their classmates. The targeted girls told their teacher that they were afraid of going to class and even attending school. Incidents such as these undermine students' safety and security in the school.
Teachers' energy was spent tending to tears and to the bruised egos of girls who had allegedly been ridiculed or otherwise assaulted by their schoolmates. As the school year progressed, I became increasingly upset by the number of girls who were being mistreated by other girls. In a desire to learn more, I read books on relational aggression to discover its root causes and help the perpetrators gain an awareness of their actions to reduce their abusive behaviours.
What is it that motivates girls to bully and victimize their peers and others? Bullying among adolescent girls is often mistaken by adults as a rite of passage and is viewed as a normal stage of development. If that were true, all adult women would be well adjusted with healthy relationships without the ghosts of aggression continually haunting them. Girls engage in relational rather than physical aggression. In her 2002 book, Odd Girl Out: The Hidden Culture of Aggression in Girls, Rachel Simmons defines relational aggression as the act of "ignoring someone to punish them, excluding someone socially for revenge, using negative body language or facial expressions and sabotaging someone else's relationships" (p. 21).
Girls will often bully their close friends under a façade of friendship, which makes the abuse more difficult for adults to detect. Because girls' relationships are central to them, they fear isolation and abandonment. Relational aggression plays on the intimacy and emotional involvement that girls invest in their friendships. Girls disclose more personal information when friendships are developing and as they become more trusting of others. However, the social climbing girl who seeks to improve her status on the social hierarchy can gain power by betraying the friendship. Secrets shared between friends become ammunition when girls sell each other out to make their way up the social ladder.
Girls have an arsenal of aggressive methods from which to choose, depending on the occasion. Two subcategories of this form of aggression are indirect aggression and social aggression.
Indirect aggression involves delegating peers to do the bully's dirty work, which results in the perpetrator not being blamed directly for the misdeed. Girls who bully will typically blame someone else for getting them in trouble, rather than taking responsibility themselves.
Social aggression involves social exclusion of or spreading rumours about someone, which undermines the targeted girl's self-esteem or social status. Social aggression manipulates the targeted girl's social status by clouding the view that others have of her and subsequently the way they respond to her.
School staff, parents and society inadvertently promote bullying by ignoring it or not holding the bullies accountable for their actions. Girls engage as frequently in aggressive behaviours as boys, but spend more time and energy on peer acceptance and social comparisons. Girls learn early that their self-worth, physical appearance or attractiveness are constantly scrutinized, and accepted or rejected by their peers.
As with psychological abuse, females' relational aggression is almost impossible to detect and prove, since there are no visible marks.
Junior high and middle schools are catalysts for relational anxiety among girls and a breeding ground for female aggression and bullying. Girls entering Grade 7 are thrust into an environment where the student population is often double that of an elementary school. The number of students can be overwhelming, and so can the crowded school hallways and pushing and shoving that ensue at every class change, which can be prime opportunities to target insecure girls.
Teachers, administrators and parents must understand that during adolescence, the constant bullying and teasing among and by girls is not a normal part of growing up and something that girls will grow out of. The manner in which teachers react to bullying episodes, as well as the consistency of consequences, will directly influence whether or not the behaviour continues. Female relational aggression is not a prerequisite of growing up—it is a behaviour based on power and control.
As is often the case, the victim becomes further penalized when the bully is not disciplined—the cycle then perpetuates itself. Those with perceived power and privilege at the top of the social hierarchy must not be given the message that they can do whatever they want to whomever they want. Bullying creates immediate or long-term side effects of social and academic problems that can have lasting effects on the targeted person, including absence from school, depression, social anxiety, anger and decreased self-esteem. If bullying is not assessed immediately and dealt with swiftly and seriously in schools, victims will continue to pay the price psychologically, academically and socially.
Educators and parents need to become more aware of the underlying causes and conditions that perpetuate female bullying. This is a complex issue ranging from parents' attitudes toward bullying and victimization to the commitment of school staff to detect it.
We can create safer and more positive schools when we gain the knowledge and resources to address, identify and educate girls and society about the conditions that instigate, encourage and perpetuate bullying.
Reference
Simmons, R. 2002. Odd Girl Out: The Hidden Culture of Aggression in Girls. New York, New York: Harcourt Inc.
Jane Hanson is a teacher with the Calgary Public School Board.
