A Study in Scarlet, Black and Blue Part 1

This is a paper for my Developmental Psychology class, thank you to all who contributed to it!
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When I set out to research the problem of girls bullying each other I assumed that it was a straight forward topic. I was idealistic, I was also wrong. Eager to learn as much as I could and discontent with information I could find in books I sent out a request. I asked girls to send me their stories if they had any. The responses I received were overwhelming.
Occasionally, a story will appear on the news were an adolescent girl, or several girls, will attack and severely hurt another. However, less than one-third of all bullying—between girls and boys—is physical. (The Bully, the Bullied and the Bystander, 2003) The rest is either verbal or relational.
Gossip shared, a rumor spread, a cruel phrase uttered: each of these is a form of verbal bullying. “An injury is much sooner forgotten than an insult,” Lord Chesterfield said. (Quotations, 225)) Despite the old adage, most would rather take the sticks and stones than the cruel statements. Words are the favorite tactic of the passive-aggressive female bully. They are easily whispered and often go unnoticed by adults. Even said aloud, insults can be masked as indirect comments. “I would never eat that much cake,” sounds innocent enough, but who can see the effect of those words on the one they are heard by? Perhaps she throws out the cake and takes a moment to look in the mirror. Perhaps she cries herself to sleep that night. Perhaps she eats it quickly and then slips away to the bathroom to throw it back up.
In his play, The Way of the World, William Congreve described gossip, “They came together like the Coroner’s Inquest, to sit upon the murdered reputation of the week.” (1700). Gossip is a particularly insidious form of bullying because it is hard to trace back to its source, and it is often continued by teenagers who mean no harm to the subject. An undisputed fact of life is that girls like to talk, and the bully who intends to use gossip and rumors to harm can rely on this fact.
Technological advancement has made this form of bullying more effective and faster. No longer do the words go away when the doors of school close behind a child. Most teens have easy access to cell phones and the Internet, which can become easy access to further bullying. Cyberbully, as it is now called, is far more anonymous than graffiti on a locker and “there is no digital janitor to paint over the Facebook wall.” (Queen bees and Wannabes, 23)
A teenage girl who opened up and told her story to me explained how in sixth grade she experienced cyberbullying, “These two popular girls found out my AIM screen name, and they would anonymously send these messages to me, saying that they were going to rape and kill me.” Unfortunately, her story is hardly unique. Girls across the country create websites entailing the ways they hate a classmate, send threats, or post private conversations in very public mediums. Parents often spend a lot of time and energy worrying about their children talking to strangers on the Internet, perhaps they should spend some of that time worrying about what the non-strangers are saying.
Often words are excused away as teasing or jokes. “Just kidding,” girls will say flippantly. This excuse not only takes blame off the offender but also trivializes the pain of the bullied girl. Cruel words are not teasing. Teasing is an open give and take where each party is equally amused, teasing watches for the line and is careful not to cross it, and teasing ends if feelings are injured by accident. Bullying does not care for the feelings of the targeted party. Bullying intends to harm. “The only thing I know for certain,” says writer Rosalind Wisemen, “is that each person’s dignity is not negotiable.” (Queen Bees and Wannabes, 14) Verbal bullying does not care for the dignity or rights of the bullied.
Physical bullying gets the most attention and the scars are certainly the easiest to see. One girl told me the story of a “friend” who purposely gave her a broken bike and laughed when she crashed. She told of another time girls in her class pinched her in front of a teacher that “either didn’t notice or didn’t care.” Another girl recalls a time when she was told by a friend to close her eyes and naively listened only to open them in time to see the girl bring a metal rod down on her foot. “Physical bullying is not exclusive to boys…” author Barbara Coloroso writes, “Girls just have a much more powerful tool against other girls.” (The Bully, the Bullied and the Bystander, 15) This brings me to the final form of bullying.
Relational bully takes place when relationships become the weapons wielded by the bully. Shunning, exclusion, ignoring or the threat of any of these falls under this category. In the television show Young Hercules, the villain of the story wants Hercules dead but cannot kill him directly. Instead he plots to separate him from his friends and cause turmoil amongst them. In his mind this was the only way to truly weaken Hercules. This is a prime example of relational bullying.
Relationships are crucial to the development of adolescent girls. They bear the fear of isolation far more than boys ever do. This form seeks to control or injure the targeted girl by diminishing her self-worth and removing her peer support system. “There is no gesture more devastating than a back turning away.” (Odd Girl Out, 3)
Relational bullying is insidious because it can come from “friends” as well as enemies. Pulled close and pushed away like a yo-yo these friendships can begin to look more like abusive boyfriends than innocent teenage girls interacting. Because the “frenemy” is sometimes kind it is easy to excuse the bad away or become convinced it will not occur again. It is easier to forgive and have fair weather friends than to be completely isolated. As they say, velvet chains are hardest to break.
Cliques in schools have become like the hairspray and lipstick version of the mob. There is a pecking order. There are rules, there are wars, and the random hostile take over. Make a mistake and you may find yourself knocked off—in the worst death most teen girls can imagine, social death. It is healthy for girls to find like-minded individuals and it is normal to spend more time with some people than others. Perhaps these two facts contribute to why cliques go ignored in most settings. However, a clique is different from a group of friends. People do not usually get killed, social or otherwise, in a group of friends.