WCAX.COM Local Vermont News, Weather and Sports-Mean Girls, Part 1

Mean Girls, Part 1

Hinesburg, Vermont - March 3, 2010

Are young girls nice girls? Or are they mean girls?

It isn't easy to tell. But what's apparent is girls are interacting with each other in a new way that parents and teachers are becoming more aware of.

"It's very quiet and insidious and they don't particularly want to talk to us about it," says Hinesburg Community School behavior specialist Jen Bradford.

So teachers are making them talk about it. Bradford and Hinesburg Community School guidance counselor Steve Hyde run a required course for all of the school's 27 seventh-grade girls.

The class uses a curriculum called 'The Ophelia Project,' which is designed to help girls understand their relationships with each other, both how they can be kind and how they can be hurtful. The class discusses different social issues like popularity, trying to break down this new kind of 'mean girl' behavior.

It's commonly known as cyber-bullying, but it's a manifestation of something much more complicated.

Simply calling it bullying is too generic since there are many forms of bullying. The first and most obvious kind is physical aggression. Then there's social aggression, which involves yelling and verbal fights. However the most complex, which 'The Ophelia Project' looks to deal with, is relational aggression, and that's a type of bullying behavior that doesn't happen on the playground. Research shows it usually happens within friendship groups and cliques, so it can quickly turn best friends into enemies.

"Because of technology what might have been a disagreement between two people becomes an all-out war with sides and victims," Bradford says.

Tiffany Larrow is a student in Bradford and Hyde's course. The 7th-grader is no stranger to social networking site Facebook, especially how her peers use it to be cruel.

"When they're on Facebook you're not looking at their face so it's easier to say stuff," Tiffany says.

Cell phones and sites like Facebook create a virtual world for girls to be relationally aggressive. By simply sending a message or typing an e-mail, classmates can become accomplices in one girl's attack.

"They make groups (on Facebook) where they call the person a mean name and then they say, 'We don't like,' and then they give the nickname," says 7th-grader Elizabeth Pawul. But she's quick to point out that the person whose nickname it is usually is familiar with the nickname and therefore knows the group is about them.

Today's girls have grown up with what adults think of as "new" technology, so adults aren't citizens of this cyber-girl world. Students like Makenna Lavalette say that makes it especially hard for parents to help, or even understand the painful situations that occur by electronic means.

"I've had them be like 'Oh you can fix it, you can fix it,'" Makenna says of adults, "and I'm like 'How? By erasing the message?' It doesn't work that way. Then you have to track everyone down, who sent it to who until you find the last person that didn't forward it."

In conjunction with 'The Ophelia Project,' Hinesburg Community School runs a weekly group for parents. It brings parents up-to-date on what their daughters are facing and how they can be involved.

A divide in understanding certainly exists between young girls and their teachers and parents, but it's one that can be conquered. Teachers say getting girls to talk about these issues in the real world takes away some of the secrecy of cyber-girl world.

Rachel Feldman - WCAX News

Related Story:

Mean Girls, Part 2