Odd Girl Out (17 page)

The sheer range of attacks that can be communicated so quickly is itself remarkable. Lauren's texts fell like an onslaught of arrows bearing multiple social poisons: relational aggression; an attack on her physical appearance; an attempt to undermine beliefs about her romantic relationship; the threat to destroy Kelsey's relationships and isolate her; and the encouragement to
kill herself.
All in a few hundred, swiftly typed characters.

At school, the conflict continued. The seamless integration between kids' virtual and real lives blew the spores of the online conflict into live conversation. Several students confronted Kelsey in the hall at school. They told her that she was a "useless whore" who did not deserve Lauren as a friend. Lauren herself approached Kelsey and her friends at a football game and yelled that she hoped Kelsey ended up dead on the side of the road.

As virtual conflicts migrate into the physical world, so do their ferocity: harsh words typed online become familiar and so more easily spoken. In this way, online communication norms desensitize the way kids communicate in person, upping the ante for aggression and bullying in both spheres.

When Kelsey and Aaron broke up, agreeing their relationship wasn't worth its price, Kelsey decided that she wanted to tell her soccer coach about the cyberbullying. Coach Rebecca had told the team she had a zero-tolerance policy for bullying. But she was also Dana's mother. When one of Kelsey's friends warned Lauren the texts were going to be reported, Dana's older sister texted Kelsey, threatening, "you know what, you better not show those texts to my mom it won't do anything so don't if you know what's good for you."

Kelsey backed off and tried to wait it out. A week later, there was another flare-up, and Lauren resumed her relentless texts. "I've done this once, I can do it again, try me b——ch," she wrote. "I will come after you, it won't be pretty, so do it again and things are going down." After each text, Kelsey denied the accusations, responded "okay," or wrote nothing at all.

But Kelsey was fatigued. Powerless to respond or make the daily texts stop, she became despondent. "I didn't feel like I could do anything," she told me. "I felt like if I told [the coach] about the texts, I would be, like, completely alone in school. So it kind of, like, scared me ... I was just so done," she recalled. There was no refuge for Kelsey: at home, each vibration of her phone made her feel nauseated. School was unsafe, and she did not want to go. She became suicidal. "I had nothing left to live for," she told me.

When something is in writing, no matter its content, it becomes strangely believable, especially to the recipient. The written word carries the suggestion of gravity and truth. Kelsey explained,

[Lauren] has spent some time putting this down. She's read it, and she knows what she's saying. She's not just angry and she's blurting out things. She's actually taking the time to think about them, and write them down, and send them to me. She actually, like, meant what she was saying ... I felt, like, worthless and like nothing was ever really going to get better. I actually thought about how much easier it would be for people if I wasn't, like, alive anymore.

We seem more willing to believe what is in writing, perhaps because so much of what we do read—in textbooks, newspapers, and novels—comes from experts or other authorities. The irony is that what girls text out of anger is often anything but thought out or well considered. It is usually quite thoughtless—but try explaining that to a distraught girl. Cyberbullying has given written cruelty a platform, frequency, and impact it never had before. And unlike speech or gesture, or even printed text, online writing leaves a trail with infinite followers.

Though easier to report, written threats are not necessarily shared. The age-old fear of "snitching," and the retaliation that could follow, is timeless. Kelsey was afraid, and she refused to tell anyone besides her mother, even as the texts piled up.

For her part, Connie Jacobs was angry and protective, but measured. She knew she faced an uphill battle. If parents feel helpless in the face of conventional bullying, their resources shrink even further when bullying goes digital. In the absence of rules or protocol at school, and limited awareness of the behavior among parents, families are largely left to fend for themselves.

In our interview, Connie repeatedly mentioned that she had waited until she was calm enough to communicate with the other girls' parents. And she refused to see Kelsey as only a target. Connie knew Kelsey had contributed to the conflict by refusing to level with Lauren about her feelings for Aaron.

When Connie e-mailed Lauren's parents, she asked gingerly if they would have time to talk about what their daughters were "going through." There was no response.

It was one of Kelsey's best friends and teammates who finally showed Coach Rebecca the texts. Rebecca called in Lauren and admonished that she was "stupid to put [her feelings] in writing." When Kelsey's mother called to complain about the slap on the wrist, Rebecca said if she penalized Lauren, she would have to penalize Kelsey. To defend her position, Rebecca relayed evidence that Kelsey had behaved aggressively—stories that had come directly from her daughter Dana. They were, Connie told me, "thirteen-year-old reasons about why Lauren was justified in yelling at Kelsey. [Kelsey] told Lauren she was not going to go out with Aaron and then did. That's what Rebecca is repeating to me," Connie said, still amazed.

"She brought up every single lie that Dana told her that would make her story sound right," Kelsey said. Connie tried to balance agreeing with the coach that Kelsey bore some responsibility for contributing to the situation with the argument that no behavior warranted the persecution her daughter had now endured.

At this point, Rebecca pursued a new line of questions. Did you know, she asked Connie, that Kelsey wanted to kill herself? That she told the other girls a bruise on her face came from her mother? Connie paused. This was new. The bruise was sustained in a private dance class. Connie tried to remain calm and asked Rebecca how she knew Kelsey had said this. Did she hear it from Kelsey? "Well, no," Connie recalled Rebecca saying. "I heard from more than one source." Connie laughed wryly. "Right. These 'sources' now have a target, and that's Kelsey."

By law, Rebecca told Connie, I'm supposed to report the bruise to child protection authorities. "I didn't," she said, "because I don't believe [Kelsey], and I've known you for a while. I knew if I had reported it that it would have been hard on your career and really embarrassing." Connie, an aide in the public school system, was horrified. "She was threatening me. She was trying to tell me that she wasn't reporting the cyberbullying because she didn't really feel like it was a valid threat to Kelsey. She made that same judgment call in my favor a couple of weeks prior."

Rebecca sensed Connie's shock. "[Rebecca] told me, she said, you don't know your daughter. I was, like, 'I'm sorry,
you
don't know my daughter. I do know my daughter. I know she's not perfect, I know she's done some things, and I don't think you do.'" The call ended a few minutes later. Connie sat holding the phone, shell-shocked. "It's every mother's worst nightmare, to have someone question if you hit your children," she said quietly.

Connie backed off. Besides avoiding the humiliation of an investigation, a major tournament was just three weeks away. She did not want to see her daughter and Lauren expelled from the team. Throughout her conversation with her daughter's coach, Connie never once mentioned the texts that had come from Rebecca's own daughter. She laughed again, humorlessly. "You know, if you attack somebody's own daughter, it's not going to go well."

After her call with Rebecca, Connie sat down with Kelsey and told her how serious the situation could become. "I gave Kelsey complete amnesty to tell me if she had said [I hit her]," Connie remembered. She leveled with her daughter about the bruise. "Anything that someone can say to me about you, I need to know. We need to be a team. I need to know everything that somebody can say about you because it's going to come up."

Kelsey stared at her mother. "Absolutely not, Ma. You know how it happened. Why would I say that?" Connie hugged her daughter, relieved.

The next day, Kelsey stayed home from school. What made it so awful was that she saw her mother cry. "It was really upsetting to see my mom, who's kind of always been that strong person for me, like, I felt like it was my fault," she remembered.

It sounds as though you handled the situation pretty sanely, I told Connie, admiringly. "I did," she said, "but not in my heart." After her conversation with the coach, she attended the next three soccer practices to watch her daughter. "I no longer felt like Rebecca was protecting my daughter or had her best interests at heart," she said. Connie also decided not to tell school officials, waiting to see if the bullying would stop. It did. One of the girls involved apologized to Kelsey. Throughout, Connie gathered documentation. Eventually, she decided they would all "ignore the elephant in the room."

While the tone and language of cyberbullying has exploded, the mechanisms for response are inconsistent and flawed. Had Kelsey's school written a coherent policy on cyberbullying, Coach Rebecca might have been obligated to take steps to report the incident. Lacking this, Rebecca's loyalty to her daughter and her daughter's friends won out. The message sent to the untold number of children and parents who witnessed the drama? The school could not be trusted to protect its students.

Many schools continue to decline to intervene in cyberbullying incidents because they occur off school grounds. Yet as any school employee knows, what happens off campus comes right back into the school and disrupts the community. In 2010 multiple suicides were linked to cyberbullying, and state legislation began mandating that school districts include electronic aggression in anti-bullying policy. One such policy, in Westport, Massachusetts, bans cyberbullying that occurs near the school or at any school event, and on or off the property "if the bullying creates a hostile environment at school for the target, infringes on their rights at school or materially and substantially disrupts the education process or the orderly operation of a school." Still, most public schools are either unable or unwilling to make cyberbullying in a private home uniformly actionable. When neither families nor schools police cyberbullying, it becomes all too easy for a cyberbully to lash out.

 

The cliques at Lindsey Garrett's middle school were fearless enough to have their own names: the Kelly, the 9, the Catty Shack, to name a few. Lindsey floated among different groups, and her artsy look made her a novelty among the girls who obsessed over brands. Still, Lindsey was always nervous. She woke up at five A.M. to straighten her hair, put on makeup, and join the "beauty contest" at school.

She had opened her first Instant Messenger and AOL accounts in elementary school. In the beginning, she remembered, "It was really cool to me that I could even say hi to someone through the Internet." Not long after starting sixth grade, relationships began to shift, an inevitable rite of passage for middle-school girls. Lindsey's oldest and closest friend, Kate, began drifting toward Nicole, a girl in the emerging popular group. Lindsey panicked. "I was jealous," she told me. "Kate was my only friend at the time. If I was coming to middle school, I wanted Kate to be my friend."

Lindsey began instant messaging with Nicole, pretending she was angry at Kate. As Nicole responded supportively, Lindsey saved the messages, then showed them to Kate. "I was, like, making Nicole say all this stuff so Kate could see she was really mean," she recalled. Lindsey also cut and pasted some of Nicole's comments and edited them to make her seem meaner. "I basically wanted to destroy the relationship between Nicole and Kate." She was successful. Five years later, Nicole and Kate still do not speak.

Like gossip, which brings girls closer even as it destroys other relationships, cyberbullying and aggression carry their own rewards. By stockpiling written conversations, Lindsey accrued a reserve of virtual evidence that she used as currency in real life. She could compensate for her disadvantaged social position by leveraging social media. "I don't know, it was, like, when you see the writing, people believe it because it's, like, writing," Lindsey told me.

In middle and high school, the stakes of friendship drama increase; losing friends is not just an emotional downturn, but a change in your overall social security. Lindsey found that she could use technology to make others experience the feelings of insecurity and fear that were roiling her throughout middle school. "People were drawn to me. I would say, 'This person said this.' That's why I would copy and paste conversations and say, 'See, I have proof.'"

More ominously, social media eroded Lindsey's integrity, allowing her to maintain her sweet exterior while experimenting with power and aggression. "I was a huge, two-faced b——ch," she said, in a tone fraught with guilt and not a little awe. "[The Internet] was definitely, like, a face I could hide behind. By kind of saying what I would say online, it was something more than I would say to this person's face." If conventional bullying allows girls to fly beneath the radar of parents and teachers, cyberbullying gives perpetrators a chance to cloak themselves further, remaining unseen by their targets. As a moral vacuum, it lets girls take leave even of themselves. They no longer have to rationalize or face their own behavior.

In high school, Lindsey drifted away from the gossipy girls who formed her inner circle. She began dating a senior boy and, she says, became less petty and more mature. "I came into myself," she explained. "I mean, I'm still who I always was ... I'm not saying I don't gossip but I just know how to do that." Lindsey understood that her strongest feelings should be shared with caution. Today, she vents only to her mother and best friend. She never shares her feelings online.

Now student body president of her high school, she is embarrassed by her prior aggressive behavior. "I was so manipulative. People didn't know I was so mean," Lindsey said. "I could go behind people's backs and, like, convince them of certain things and, like, people always believed me." At the same time, Lindsey is honest about the power and success she discovered as a cyberbully. It "felt good," she told me, to destroy Kate and Nicole's friendship, and there were still other relationships Lindsey admitted she sabotaged.