Odd Girl Out (2 page)

That day, I carried with me the memory of a late night at college, when a casual midnight snack led to six of us confessing that an Abby haunted our past. It was exhilarating to discover we'd all been through the same ordeal. Like me, my friends had spent years believing they were the only ones.

Armed with that knowledge, I pedaled carefully along the slick streets, certain there would be volumes of books waiting to explain how and why girls bully each other. When my first few computer searches turned up next to nothing, I chalked it up to rusty research skills, or rushing. Then I called the librarian over for help. As it turned out, I'd been doing just fine on my own.

In a sea of articles on boys' aggression and bullying, there were only a small handful of articles about girls. There were no accessible books. No guides for parents. No cute survival manuals for kids. As I sat reading the articles, I could not see myself or Abby in what most of these researchers called bullying. I was first surprised, then frustrated.

I sent out an e-mail to everyone I knew in the States and asked them to forward it to as many women as they could. I asked a few simple questions: "Were you ever tormented or teased by another girl? Explain what it was like. How has it affected you today?" Within twenty-four hours my in box was flooded with responses from all over America. The messages piled up as women told their stories into cyberspace with an emotional intensity that was undeniable. Even on the computer screen, their pain felt as fresh and unresolved as my own. Women I never met wrote that I would be the first person ever to hear their story. It would be a long time before I knew it was because I was the first to ask.

 

Silence is deeply woven into the fabric of the female experience. It is only in the last thirty years that we have begun to speak the distinctive truths of women's lives, openly addressing rape, incest, domestic violence, and women's health. Although these issues always existed, over time we have given them a place in our culture by building public consciousness, policy, and awareness.

Now it is time to end another silence: There is a hidden culture of girls' aggression in which bullying is epidemic, distinctive, and destructive. It is not marked by the direct physical and verbal behavior that is primarily the province of boys. Our culture refuses girls access to open conflict, and it forces their aggression into nonphysical, indirect, and covert forms. Girls use backbiting, exclusion, rumors, name-calling, and manipulation to inflict psychological pain on victimized targets. Unlike boys, who tend to bully acquaintances or strangers, girls frequently attack within tightly knit networks of friends, making aggression harder to identify and intensifying the damage to the targets.

Within the hidden culture of aggression, girls fight with body language and relationships instead of fists and knives. In this world, friendship is a weapon, and the sting of a shout pales in comparison to a day of someone's silence. There is no gesture more devastating than the back turning away.

In the hidden culture of aggression, anger is rarely articulated, and every day of school can be a new social minefield that realigns itself without warning. During times of conflict, girls will turn on one another with a language and justice only they can understand. Behind a facade of female intimacy lies a terrain traveled in secret, marked with anguish, and nourished by silence.

This is the world I want the reader to enter. It is where, beneath a chorus of voices, one girl glares at another, then smiles silently at her friend. The next day a ringleader passes around a secret petition asking girls to outline the reasons they hate the targeted girl. The day after that, the outcast sits silently next to the boys in class, head lowered, shoulders slumped forward. The damage is neat and quiet, the aggressor and target invisible.

Public awareness of bullying has grown in recent years, propelled by the tragedies of youth gun violence. The national conversation on bullying, however, has trained its spotlight mostly on boys and their aggression. Defining bullying in the narrowest of terms, it has focused entirely on physical and direct acts of violence. The aggression of girls, often hidden, indirect, and nonphysical, has gone unexplored. It has not even been called aggression, but instead "what girls do."

Yet women of every age know about it. Nearly all of us have been bystanders, targets, or bullies. So many have suffered quietly and tried to forget. Indeed, this has long been one of girlhood's dark, dirty secrets. Nearly every woman and girl has a story. It is time to break the silence.

 

I set out to interview girls between the ages of ten and fourteen, the years when bullying peaks. On my first day, I worked with several groups of ninth graders at a coed private school on the East Coast. My plan was to encourage an informal discussion guided by a list of questions I'd written down. Standing before each class, I introduced myself, explained my own history with bullying, and told the girls what we'd be discussing. Without fail, the girls would do a double take.
Talking about
what?
During class?
They snickered and whispered.

I started each session with the same question: "Do you think there are differences between the ways guys are mean to each other and the ways girls are mean to each other?" The whispering stopped. Then the hands flew like streamers. Suddenly, they couldn't talk fast enough. Their banter was electric. The girls hooted, screeched, laughed, snorted, and veered off into personal stories, while notes flew around the room, accompanied by rolling eyes and searing and knowing glances.

It was exhausting. My carefully organized list of research questions grew stale in my hand.

Not a single one of my group discussions that day went according to plan. This, it turned out, was a good thing. I quickly understood that trying to box the girls' voices into my prearranged questions would make them think I was an authority figure, and this was the last thing I wanted to be. I wanted
them
to be the authorities. After all, they were living what I was trying to understand. It wasn't a tactic so much as an instinct.

The girls responded in kind. Over the months that followed, we traded e-mail and instant message handles, talked about music groups, new shoes, summer plans, and crushes. They showed and told me things their teachers and parents couldn't know about. We sometimes strayed from the topic at hand to talk about the pressures of school and family.

Over time, however, I realized there was another reason for the ease we felt with one another. Most people who talk to kids about bullying approach the issue with the same message: Don't do it. Be nice to each other.

I came from the opposite place. My assumption was not that the girls ought not to be mean, but that they were; not that they should be nice, but that they weren't. I was there not to stop them, but because I wanted them to help other girls find a way to deal with it. If they wanted to participate in the group discussion, fine; if they didn't, they had to sit quietly and they couldn't bother the ones who did. Either way, I told them, they'd get a free snack out of it.

More often than not during the sessions, a girl would tell her own story of victimization. She might begin by replying to one of her classmates' remarks, and then, as though taken by surprise, slide into a slow, tearful remembering of her pain. Although I knew I was in the classrooms only to conduct research, I was overwhelmed by feelings of protectiveness toward these girls.

For this reason, I adhered to an informal discussion format, going with the girls where they wanted to go. Like the women I met on the Internet, many of the girls had never been asked about this part of their lives. Like me, they seemed to feel that they were all alone, the only ones to have gone through this. I met their sadness at the level of my own. They had chosen me to hear their stories, and I wanted to honor their voices. I also wanted them to realize it happened to me and plenty of others. It felt inhumane to move over and through their pain and on to the next question on the list. Sometimes I got through all my questions, sometimes I didn't. If my work suffers in any way, the responsibility is mine, and it's one I am happy to take.

During this period, I was guided by the work of psychologists Lyn Mikel Brown and Carol Gilligan, to whose pioneering research with girls I owe a huge intellectual debt. With a group of colleagues, Brown and Gilligan developed a "Listening Guide" to use in their interviews.
³
The method emphasizes flexibility and harmony with the interview subject, and it discourages orthodox interview protocols. Instead, researchers are to "move where the girls [lead]" them. The method is especially important to girls who might otherwise stay quiet in the presence of an interviewer who appears to have an agenda. Staying with the girls' voices, rather than emphasizing one's own, "can help girls to develop, to hold on to, or to recover knowledge about themselves, their feelings, and their desires," according to Brown and Gilligan. "Taking girls seriously encourages them to take their own thoughts, feelings, and experience seriously, to maintain this knowledge, and even to uncover knowledge that has become lost to them." With such an emotional issue as girls' bullying, this seemed more than appropriate.

As I sought out more schools to work with, I got mixed responses from administrators. Most were relieved to have me talk with their students. Staff had been mystified by the intensity of the girls' anger toward one another. They were bewildered and overwhelmed by the episodes unfolding around them.

The smaller towns and some private schools were less welcoming. Their refusal to grant me access, though never explained, seemed to me a sign of anxiety that the truth would be discovered about their girls: that yes, indeed, they
were
capable of being mean. In a society raising girls to be loving and "nice," this was no small exposure.

Because of the sensitive nature of the discussions, I made another decision. To get a comprehensive account of the problem of girl bullying, I had originally planned to travel to as many different cities as I could. After a few intensive sessions with the girls, I knew this would be impossible. To earn their trust, and the faith of their teachers and parents, I would need to become a part of their communities. For this reason I chose to stay in three parts of the country for extended periods. I was rewarded with almost unconditional access and support by many of my host schools. Two schools even reversed their policy of not permitting researchers on campus to allow me to work with their girls.

In exchange for their generosity, I promised to change the names of the girls, staff members, and schools. Other than giving an economic and racial profile, I use very few details to describe each school. I worked with a total of ten over a period of one year. In a major middle-Atlantic city, I visited three schools: the Linden School, a private school with mostly middle-class students, 25 percent of whom are minority; Marymount, a private all-girls school with a predominantly middle-class population and about 20 percent students of color; and Sackler Day School, a suburban middle-class Jewish day school. In a second Northeastern city, I visited Clara Barton High School, an alternative high school, and Martin Luther King Elementary; both schools had predominantly black, Puerto Rican, and Dominican populations. I also worked at the Arden School, a laboratory school with a mostly middle-class population that is 20 percent minority, and Sojourner Truth, an all-girls school with a majority black and Latina student body. Finally, I spent several weeks visiting the elementary, middle, and high schools in Ridgewood, a small town in northeast Mississippi.

At each school, I conducted group and individual interviews with students and interested staff and parents. At some schools, interviews took as many as three or four hours. At other schools, where time for the interviews was more limited, the meetings were shorter. At two of the urban schools, I struggled to connect with some students and parents. The families were mostly poor, and some did not have telephones, although I am sure my presence as a white, middle-class woman deterred an unknown number of others. Some students and parents expressed interest, then did not return my call or meet me at the appointed time. At every school I was disappointed, though not surprised, to find no parent willing to discuss a daughter who bullied.

In addition to girls and their parents, I interviewed approximately fifty adult women by phone and in person. I include their stories because time and therapy have given them broader, more nuanced perspectives on their ordeals. Their voices present a marked contrast to the stories of young targets and bullies.

Although I sought guidance from the methods of Brown and Gilligan, this book is not the product of a formal research experiment. In it you will not find statistics or scientific conclusions about girls and aggression or information about boys. Few would argue that boys have access to a wide range of ways to express their anger. Many girls, on the other hand, are forced to cut themselves off from direct aggression altogether.

Odd Girl Out
is the first book devoted exclusively to girls and nonphysical conflict, and it tells the stories of aggressors and targets of what I call "alternative," or unconventional, aggressions.

In no way do I want to imply that only girls behave in these ways. Boys most definitely engage in alternative aggressions, though reportedly at later stages of childhood than girls. Nor am I suggesting that
all
girls do it. Although I set out to map the hidden culture of girls' aggression, it was always clear to me that not all white, middle-class girls lock conflict out of their relationships. Overwhelmed by what I was discovering, I neglected to talk with more girls who do feel comfortable with anger and conflict. I regret that.

I will use the term "girl bullying" throughout the book to refer to acts of alternative aggression. Yet I am arguing not that girls
feel
angry in fundamentally different ways than boys, but that many girls appear to
show
anger differently. Girls' aggression may be covert and relational; it may indeed be fueled at times by a fear of loss or isolation. That does not mean, however, that girls do not want power or feel aggression as passionately as their male peers.