Everything Nice....Right.

When girls go to school, they need many things.

They need pens, pencils and notebooks. They need paper, a compass and a backpack.

And, according to a spate of new books on the subject, a suit of armor might come in handy for the American girl heading off for school as well. She’ll need it, not to deflect spitwads or dodgeballs, but to ward off the damage inflicted by her own: other girls.

Although anyone who has ever attended fifth grade could tell you that this is not a recent problem, the attention currently paid to it is new, and represents somewhat of a change in academic thinking. Since the 1980’s the conversation about women’s emotional lives has been dominated by the work of Harvard psychologist Carol Gilligan who, in her seminal work In a Different Voice, argued that women and girls root their moral decision-making in concrete concerns of caring and relationship rather than abstract ideals – in short, that if women, naturally more caring and nurturing than men, ran the world there would be no wars.

And to this, the middle school teacher says, “Hah!”

For what this middle school teacher has seen is girls at war, often in amazingly devious ways and with astonishing level of cruelty.

The observant parent has seen this too, if not directly, perhaps in the wreckage left by these battles: girls bewildered and devastated by their treatment at the hands of those who were yesterday their “best friends,” lonely girls, insecure girls, girls struggling to walk the line between their desire to be popular (good, mostly) without crossing over the line to being perceived as “all that.” (definitely bad)

Why do girls do these things? Why do girls allow these things to happen to them? Why can’t they just move on? Why do the little betrayals of other pre-teens about silly things even distract them for one second from the business of life? And what can we do to help?

Even as Carol Gilligan’s work was filtering its way through our cultural consciousness, other researchers around the world were beginning to question it, particularly as it related to aggression.

For years, aggression had been defined as an almost exclusively male problem, but these researchers, in examining the ways teen girls treated each other, began to conclude that this just was not so. Girls might not be as physically aggressive as boys, true, but they certainly get angry as often as boys do, and find ways to express anger.

And for many girls, much of this expression occurs in the context of their relationships with their friends and is often indirect.

Friendships form the centers of most girls’ lives, according to these writers, and because of that, these relationships become the place where girls are processing their emotions, not only about the other girls, but about their own changing selves as well.

So in these battles, girls form cliques with sometimes elaborate rules and harsh consequences for breaking those rules. They decide, for no apparent reason, to isolate another girl and pass around a paper urging others to join the “I Hate Jane” or “Jane is a Ho” club. They treat a girl as if she doesn’t exist. They engage in the breathtakingly underhanded act of Sally calling Mary encouraging her to dish about her supposed friend Lois without telling Mary that this is really a three-way call and Lois is listening to every word on another line.

And why? The current spate of writers on the subject all agree that girls bully this way because of the social pressures on girls not to express anger or engage in conflict directly.

Psychologist Sharon Lamb suggests in her book The Secret Lives of Girls:

“Because middle class girls in our culture are not permitted to be angry, they go to great pains to deny, suppress, mask or hide it…girls are masters of indirection when it comes to anger….it emerges in ways that elicit strong social disapproval…gossiping, excluding, and withdrawal…Teachers who spend a great deal of time with grade-school girls often claim that they think that girls are ‘even meaner’ than boys, because they’ve witnessed the cruelty of a malicious rumor or a cold shoulder.”

In Odd Girl Out: The Hidden Culture of Aggression in Girls, Rachel Simmons writes not as much about the female bully herself, but about her victims, but unexpressed anger and pain is the culprit here, as well. She tells many stories of girls enmeshed in relationships with other girls, sometimes over the course of years, in which they are pushed and pulled in a wrenching dance of acceptance and rejection, often defined by the threat, “If you do that, we can’t be friends anymore.” Why do they take it?

“A girl learns early on that to voice conflict directly with another girl may result in many others ganging up on her. She learns to channel feelings of hurt and anger to avoid their human instigator, internalizing feelings or sharing them with others. She learns to store away unresolved conflicts with the precision of a bookkeeper, building a stockpile that increasingly crowds her emotional landscape and social choices. “

In other words, she will do anything to keep her friends.

This portrait of Girl World – seething girls battling for dominance over other girls in order to build up themselves and mask their own frustration - is certainly depressing. It’s also not the whole picture, as any parent knows.

But the fact is that girls can be terribly mean to one another and the consequences of this cruelty can be long-lasting. If anyone knows how real it is, it’s Rosalind Wiseman, author of Queen Bees and Wannabees: Helping Your Daughter Survive Cliques, Gossip, Boyfriends and Other Realities of Adolescence.

Wiseman has spent the last ten years working with girls ages 10 to 18 on these issues as part of her work with the Empower Program, an organization dedicated to helping both boys and girls find alternatives to violence. During that time she has worked with thousands of girls at scores of schools, including Catholic schools, helping them understand the social dynamics of their age group, critique that dynamic, and “own up” to those they have hurt.

In an interview with Our Sunday Visitor, Wiseman explained the importance of her work:

“Girls know what’s going on,” she said, “but they don’t understand it. They need to define and name what they’re experiencing. When girls don’t know how to name the behavior, they blame themselves.”

In other words, a girl being bullied by other girls often tends to think that she – not the perpetrators – is the problem, and if she can just change or comply with the bully’s demands, the aggression will stop.

Wiseman has given her program in all kinds of schools, including Catholic high schools. It’s not often that she finds that the Catholic identity of a school makes much difference in the power of female bullying.

“I find it sometimes in religious schools – especially Quaker schools it seems – that you’ll find girls who’ll stand apart and say, ‘This is not what we’re supposed to be about here,’ but it’s rare.”

Both Wiseman and Simmons agree, however, that school environment can make a difference in diminishing the impact of female bullying. The problem is that this kind of aggression is not as obvious as the more physical male aggression, and is harder to identify and punish. However difficult it is, though, Wiseman says that it’s absolutely necessary for schools to take a stand:

“Schools must hold kids accountable for their actions,” she says, “and not treat them according to who their parents are or how much money they give the school.”

Simmons and Wiseman both provide interesting and useful analyses of the issue of female bullies. They point out that girls should be taught that anger and conflict don’t threaten female identity and shouldn’t be hidden. Simmons writes:

“When girls understand that relationship can be chosen and that conflict is natural, their social identities will cease to hinge on how many idealized friendships they can rack up. Conflict will no longer feel like a violation of relationship but rather will be seen as a byproduct of relationship…We need to stop rewarding manipulation. We must encourage girls to embrace respectful acts of assertion…”

Lamb’s book can be left on the shelf, however, being, as it is, firmly in the Judith Levine Harmful to Minors genre of advocating sexual license for children and youth. (Lamb, by the way, is on the faculty of the nominally Catholic St. Michael’s College in Vermont.)

But there’s still something missing in the current secular examination of female children’s aggression.

*School. School is the hothouse in which these hurtful behaviors are nurtured and grow. What is it about the structure of the modern school day and curriculum that gives girls the leisure and license to engage in these kinds of activities?

*Self-definition. This is really the most important issue of all. All three of these authors accept without much argument the suggestion that girls are going to define themselves according to their peers and other social pressures. They present Girl World as a given, with no attention to the girls – and there are many – who have refused to let themselves be defined by these forces and thrived as a result.

Reading these books is depressing – there’s not one independent, free-thinking girl in the bunch. Not one girl who isn’t defined by either peers, parental pressure, or the culture. Not one girl who isn’t either part of a clique or victimized by one. Not one girl who has goals and aspirations related to her own unique gifts and possibilities.

For Christian parents, Wiseman’s book in particular may be a helpful and realistic guide to what their daughter might be experiencing – and believe us when we say that all girls who go to any kind of school are exposed to manipulative aggression by other girls to some degree.

But what’s missing is the apparently radical alternative of teaching your daughter, from the day she is born, that she is not ever to allow her identity to be defined by others – not by peers, not by social and cultural forces, and not even by her parents. Her fundamental identity is rooted in the amazing fact that God chose to create her, that He loves her, and that he has put her on this earth for a wonderful reason, and this earth is a much bigger place than 8th grade.

No matter what the Queen Bee has to say about it.