Recently a friend of mine shared a story of her daughter being bullied by her friend. When I heard this happening in seventh grade, I felt completely pained by the actions these children today endure in during adolescence. It brought me back to another incident which happened to a great friend of mine, which I didn’t have the privilege of knowing her in adolescence / teenage age or college years for that fact. Nonetheless, Gabriella recalls a new girl ( Grace) arriving in her small suburban town. Gabriella along with her friends had never seen anything like her. Grace was from New Jersey. She wore hip-hugger bell-bottoms, knew sexy line dances, smoked cigarettes, and had actually kissed a boy.
She was also mean. She befriended Gabriella initially — perhaps because she lived next door and she needed a friend. But once she realized Gabriella was a shy bookworm, she dropped her. Then she laughed at Gabriella’s clothes (in her face) and started rumors about her (behind her back).
Eventually Gabriella learned to ignore her. But the pain of her rejection haunted her for years. It even made her distrustful of “girl groups” long into adulthood.
The topic of childhood bullying is not new. Dozens of lay books and scholarly journals have explored the ways “relational aggression — tactics such as exclusion, rumor mongering, and Internet harassment — can damage boy’s & girl’s ‘ self-esteem. But only recently have researchers begun looking at what bullying does to the bullies themselves. The news is not good.
The Impact of Bullying
In the short term, girl and boy bullies often are rejected by peers and lack meaningful relationships,
Girl Wars: 12 Strategies That Will End Female Bullying; Charisse Nixon PHD is the author of this book and an assistant professor of developmental psychology at Pennsylvania State University.
In her book she describes the long term view is that “these girls learn to manipulate people like chess pieces; unfortunately, this can harm their ability to have meaningful relationships and successful careers.”
Some characteristics of a girl bully are jealousy, feelings of superiority, poor impulse control, and lack of empathy. Nixon believes girls bully when their basic needs of “ABCs, and me” — acceptance (by self), belonging (among others), control, and meaningful existence — are thwarted. “These needs apply to everyone,” she notes, “children and adults.” People will do what they need to do to get those needs met.
How to Prevent Bullying
Whatever the cause of bullying, researchers are now focusing on prevention — including counseling to get at the root of the need to bully; teaching healthy communication skills; and introducing schoolwide antibullying programs.
Researchers are gaining more and more insights into what drives girl / boy bullies — and why they so desperately need help.
Developmentally, adolescents often have no idea how their behavior hurts others. It is done more to exhibit there acceptance into a group or gain a higher standard for themselves
Model healthy ways of dealing with conflict . As grown-ups we are often unconscious of the ways we ourselves bully, like the way we gossip behind people’s backs. But our children pick up on all that,
We as a society need to make sure our children basic needs are being met. These include acceptance and a sense of belonging. “If these kids not getting what they need, they’ll find a destructive way to cope.”
No antibullying programs — or even caring adults — existed to help my friend Gabriella’s tormentor, Grace who was having a hard time herself. She had just moved to a new school and her parents were divorced. No doubt Grace put Gabriella down to give her own social standing a leg up. It’s a shame she had no better way to really cope with the underlying issue.
