Odd Girl Out (48 page)

To complicate matters, girl fights lack the boldly drawn lines of battles between boys. Girls' conflicts run deep under the ground like the roots of an old tree. The lack of awareness of these behaviors only reinforces the anxiety many adults feel toward girls' relational conflicts. "Girls' relationships make me nervous," one veteran teacher confided, "and I'm not qualified to recommend psychological help."

Many educators who would otherwise be willing to lend a hand are adrift without a disciplinary infrastructure or public language to describe girls' behavior. Marilyn, who has taught elementary school for over twenty years, explained, "I mean, how do you say to a parent, 'Your child is a consummate liar'? They don't want to hear that from me!" A new vocabulary shared by a school community would report on children's behavior in less inflammatory terms. Parents could refer to acts of relational, indirect, or social aggression such as rumor spreading, alliance building, or nonverbal gesturing. In turn, educators might feel less fearful about approaching parents.

It is in part the invisibility of girls' aggression that puts educators on such shaky ground. Many refuse to discipline behavior they did not themselves see. Marilyn explained, "It's easier to stop the physical because it's visual, and if you come across it, if you see one child stick his foot out, or see somebody hit somebody, or move a chair out from behind someone, that's very easy to confront because it's right there. The innuendo or slight—you have to be present, and you have to be right on top of it."

Barring cameras in the classroom, educators aren't going to get instant replay; behavior that is open to question may remain so. "I don't hesitate to confront a child if I know I have ground to stand on. But you don't want to put yourself in jeopardy or a situation where you're not quite sure what's going on," Marilyn said. Later, she added, "Parents are always watching you. They can be your best ally and worst enemy."

Indeed. Even a note in a message box from a parent can be enough to make a teacher panic. An elementary-school teacher described the intense anxiety she feels when confronting a parent over a child's problem. "You get a note and you go home [anxious], and you stay up all night talking to your husband. Educators walk out of the building crying over things like this." Marilyn has concluded it's generally useless to inform parents about the misbehavior of their children. "There's no rationale. It's not an intellectual reaction. It's like the lioness and her cubs. They're going to protect them no matter what. As a teacher," she said, "you don't want to touch that. I'm not the enemy," she noted, "but at some point, you just back off and don't go there anymore."

These days educators have their noses to the grindstone to keep their students working at a demanding academic pace. A teacher in a top-rated public school district explained, "Girls bullying each other is the farthest thing from our minds. I'm sorry, but I wasn't looking for it. It doesn't happen in that fifty-minute [class period]. I'm not noticing it. I'm not focused on it. I'm too focused on instruction. I don't have time for that.

"We're not trained to look for that," she added. "We are trained to make sure they are doing their books." The idea that educators should be attuned to students' body language exasperates her. "It's so hard to be up all the time. You have to be on top of everything and you're bombarded constantly. And now, on top of everything, you have to be aware of the situation they're going through, aware of body language—all of it!"

Not surprisingly, educators are apt to misinterpret problems at school. Maryann, also a twenty-year veteran of the classroom, told me that sometimes girls "misunderstand" other girls. "There's two girls who have a secret together," she explained to me. "It could be a good secret or a bad secret, just something that the two of them want to keep for themselves." She told me the story of a third grader who became "hysterical" when her best friends stopped talking every time she approached. She was devastated that her two best friends had left her out.

"I don't know how they could have voiced [the need to exclude her] without hurting her feelings. Even if they had said, 'Look, this is something we need to keep private between us,' she would have still felt left out." Maryann took the three girls outside and tried to help the excluded girl understand that some people needed to keep secrets.

When I press Maryann about why she permitted the girls to do this, she admits she didn't know what the secret was, just that she respected their right to keep it. "They said it was private," she explains. Yet there is a difference between keeping information private between two people and flaunting the privacy itself. Making distinctions like this one is critical to understanding how subtle the aggression between girls can be.

There is a darker misunderstanding between educators and students to explore. Educators do not have access to a neutral language to name girls' aggression, and many are unaware of the social and psychological impact of stifling anger. As a result, it becomes easier to resent girls' behavior and give in to cruel stereotypes. One of my old teachers put it simply, echoing a remark I've heard more times than I care to count: "I'd much rather deal with men. They are generally straightforward and honest with you. With men, you know where you stand." The impact of such attitudes on educators' work in the classroom is unknown.

None of this is to say educators prefer ignorance. When I called Lynn, the same school counselor I wept to when Abby took me on in the third grade, she was thrilled to hear from me. A slight woman with a globe of brown curls, a freckled face, and the presence of a center forward, she hugged me, asked me about my brother (himself no stranger to this office), then settled back into her chair. "The biggest difficulty I encounter, the hardest thing to work through, is this awful thing that girls do to each other," she said, crossing her legs and frowning. "I have been waiting twenty-five years for some-one that would explain this to me."

Like Lynn, some educators have chosen to confront alternative aggressions despite the shroud of silence that surrounds the topic. For Amber it is the memory of her own victimization that moves her. An elementary-school teacher in Mississippi, she sat with me one day in her classroom and told me about it: "I was short, had buck teeth and glasses. I know how it feels, and it's not gone away, and it's been twenty years. It's never gone away. I'm the most insecure person in the whole world. No one in my classroom would probably know that because I'm always telling them that we can do anything. I still, you know, I still can hear those kids calling me names and not accepting me because of my looks, my physical appearance."

Amber hawkishly forbids verbal cruelty in her classroom. She recalled escorting a boy and girl into the hall after they traded insults and speaking to them frankly about her own life. "It hurts, doesn't it?" she said. "I've been there. I had buck teeth. They may not be now, but [the teasing] hurt me." When she takes girls outside, she often gives them equal time to tell their stories.

In schools where physical violence is common, psychological aggression can take a back seat. School professionals triage student battles, focusing on the most violent altercations. Unfortunately, this is like waiting until a fire has fully consumed a house to call the fire department. As I show in chapter eight, girls' brawls are virtually always the endgame of a drama that began beneath the radar, using weapons like relational aggression, gossip, negative body language, and so on. The aggression may become visible with a shove or yank, but it almost never began there.

 

creating a safe school culture

A classroom sensitive to alternative aggressions is managed by an educator who openly discusses its different forms. An educator may use lessons with stories of children who experience alternative aggressions. She may openly discuss her own history with bullying. He may use instruction time to talk about the social dynamics of the class. She may work with colleagues to share effective discipline strategies and discuss the social climate of the grade. He may take time out to praise acts of truth telling and assertiveness in the classroom.

None of this can occur sustainably without the support and authority of an administrator. The decision to create a safe school culture must be made at the top and integrated into every part of a community. In the next section, I outline the structural changes needed to reduce bullying in schools. Much of my thinking in this area has been guided by the work of Dan Olweus and the Olweus Bullying Prevention Program, a rigorously researched and evaluated anti-bullying initiative for schools. From where educators should stand in the hallways to how lunchtimes can be made safe for all, the wide-ranging program works with every level of a school community and attempts to redefine the norms associated with bullying itself.

Develop an anti-bullying policy.
There is no excuse for a school to lack an anti-bullying policy. It's like not having a fire safety plan. Although many states now require public schools to develop an anti-bullying policy, several states still do not; private schools are under no obligation at all.

The purpose of a policy is both symbolic and practical. Its existence sends a clear signal to the community about the school's core values and priorities. Knowing a policy is in place authorizes educators to use their judgment with confidence as they manage their classrooms. A good policy also stipulates protocol—that is, a systematic way of doing things—which lets the community know that cases will be handled on their merits and rules applied consistently, without regard to family, class, race, or gender.

School anti-bullying policies and handbooks must be revised to reflect the new research on alternative aggressions. Schools need to define clearly what constitutes aggressive behavior among
all
students such as rumor spreading, alliance building, and severe episodes of nonverbal aggression. For example, it might acknowledge that intentionally damaging another child's relationships is a form of actionable aggression.

Policy development should occur among individuals who represent different constituencies in the school: students, parents, staff, faculty, and administrators. A robust policy will not only designate unacceptable behaviors but affirm the school's values and desired behavior across its entire community.

The best school policies attend to electronic aggression. In the twenty-first century, it is impossible to keep students safe at school without holding them responsible for cyberbullying. The vast majority of schools decline to intervene in these episodes because they occur off school grounds. Yet anyone who has spent five minutes in a school knows that what happens off campus comes back into the school the next day, disrupting the community. Conflicts intensify, students can't focus, and school counselors and administrators are brought in to clean up the mess. Without the ability to hold students responsible for their actions, a vacuum is created where students can act out against each other without deterrent.

While there are important legal issues of free speech to consider here, it is no longer acceptable to argue that anti-bullying policy remain squarely within the school's gates. Cyberbullying is a game changer; it literally shatters the walls between school and home. There is no escape. As Wired Safety founder Parry Aftab has said, cyberbullying follows you everywhere: home, to summer camp, to Grandma's house.

Increasingly, schools are arguing that students must be held accountable for what happens off campus because of the school resources required to manage the aftereffects of cyberbullying. This is the right direction for schools to be heading.

Develop a consistent intervention protocol for educators.
When a community has not come to agreement about what bullying means and how it should be addressed, enforcement can be wildly erratic. Consistent intervention with girls—indeed, with any student—is crucial to creating a safe school climate. As Dan Olweus and Susan Limber have written, "Students need to experience that adults in your school will address bullying in roughly the same way, using the same rules and similar guidelines for use of positive and negative consequences. This ... assures students who are bullied that adults will take action to stop bullying."
⁹⁵

When only certain students get in trouble, it sends the message that some students live above the law. At a public high school in the South, a cheerleader was caught with marijuana in her bag on a school trip. The squad's sponsor, who was also a teacher at the school, asked the assistant principal to remove the girl from the squad. Legal charges were pending, but the administrator refused. The girl's father was a prominent community figure and booster club donor, and her brother was the quarterback on the football team.

Intermittent enforcement erodes a student's sense that she is safe at school. This invariably adds to student anxiety, makes kids think they can break the rules with certain adults, and leads to a pervasive loss of faith in adults at the school. Administrators cannot be people pleasers. The most effective school leaders are willing to risk losing a prominent family in order to keep their communities safe.

Enforcement may be inconsistent because educators do not know how to respond to peer aggression. Graduate schools of education rarely train teachers in this area, so administrators should never assume that a teacher simply "knows" how to reprimand and discipline a student.
⁹⁶
It is simply unfair to assume educators are ignorant or unwilling to address bullying. Staff need training to know what to say and how to say it. When they do not feel empowered to intervene, staff send the message that bullying is acceptable and will not be disciplined by authority figures at the school.

When I visit schools, educators ask me all the time for scripts and strategies to deal with an aggressive girl. Many of them seem to think extraordinary or unusual tricks are required to intervene effectively. This is a myth. In fact, dealing with girls is not all that different from how many staff already address more conventional forms of aggression or rule breaking.