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n e w ly r e v i s e d a n d u p d a t e d

“Required reading for young girls and their mothers.”


— boston g lobe

N at i o n a l B e s t s e l l e r

Odd Girl Out


The Hidden Culture of Aggression in Girls

rachel
simmons
o d d girl o u t
the
hidden
culture of
aggression
in girls

C O M P L ET E LY R E V I S E D
A N D U P DAT E D

rachel simmons

mariner books
houghton mifflin harcourt

boston new york


First Mariner Books edition 2011
Copyright © 2002 by Rachel Simmons
All rights reserved.
For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book,
write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company,
215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.
www.hmhbooks.com
The Library of Congress Cataloging has cataloged the hardcover edition as follows:
Simmons, Rachel, 1974–
Odd girl out: the hidden culture of aggression in girls/
Rachel Simmons.—1st ed.
p. cm.
isbn 978-0-15-100604-5 isbn 978-0-15-602734-2 (pbk.)
isbn 978-0-547-52019-3 (rev. ed.)
1. Aggressiveness in children. 2. Girls—Psychology. I. Title.
BF723.A35 .S56 2002
302.5'4'08342—dc21 2001006864
Text set in Galliard
Book design by Kaelin Chappell
Printed in the United States of America
doc 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
contents

foreword xv

introduction 1

c h a p t e r one the hidden culture of aggression in girls 15

c h a p t e r two intimate enemies 39


c h a p t e r three the truth hurts 67

c h a p t e r four bff 2.0: cyberbullying and cyberdrama 103

c h a p t e r five she’s all that 145


c h a p t e r six the bully in the mirror 171

c h a p t e r seven popular 197


c h a p t e r eight resistance 219

c h a p t e r nine parents speak 245

c h a p t e r ten helping her through drama, bullying, 269


and everything in between
c h a p t e r eleven raising girls in a digital age 313
c h a p t e r twelve the road ahead for educators and administrators 335
conclusion 359

notes 369
bibliography 377

acknowledgments 387

index 391

about the book 397

about the author 399


discussion questions 401

tips to further enhance your reading of Odd Girl Out 405


c h a p t e r twelve

the road ahead for educators and administrators

When I first wrote Odd Girl Out, I had no experience in the class-
room other than as an observer. All that changed when the book was
published. I began working with schools to develop strategies to re-
duce bullying. I went into the trenches, serving as a classroom
teacher with girls in elementary, middle, and high schools. I co-
founded the Girls Leadership Institute and wrote curricula to de-
velop girls’ social-emotional learning skills. Today, I am a teacher
myself.
One of our best hopes for changing the hidden culture of girls’
aggression is educators. An educator can create a classroom culture
that understands the range of girls’ aggressions, refuses to tolerate
them, invites girls’ private and public discussion of them, and seeks
solutions wherever possible. It is in the classroom that a girl can learn
that alternative aggressions are nonassertive acts. Educators can
teach girls that indirection and manipulation are unsatisfactory ways
to express negative feelings.
Beginning in preschool, along with how to stand in line, how to
be quiet when the teacher asks, how to take care of the pet guinea

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odd pig, and how to wait their turn, girls and boys can learn that alterna-
girl tive aggressions are not acceptable. Just as they are taught that
out punching to get what you want is a kind of violence, students must
learn that threatening to not be someone’s friend is, too. The lessons
must begin early and continue year after year. Just because alter-
native aggressors sigh instead of shout, snort instead of tease, roll
their eyes instead of taunt, or turn their backs instead of hit, they
shouldn’t be let off the hook. Banning these behaviors and socializ-
ing girls away from them should become as important as any other
lesson in character education.
Yet educators alone cannot be expected to carry this load. If this
is a culture that blames parents for everything wrong at home, it’s
also a culture that blames educators for everything wrong at school.
Educators cannot be the architects of lasting change without the
support of colleagues, principals, and superintendents. On a day-to-
day level, educators must feel that time spent on these issues is nei-
ther wasted nor stolen but instead important to their students’
education and development. This chapter examines girl bullying
from an educator’s perspective. I explore the obstacles professionals
face, along with strategies they can use right now to create a safer
learning environment for students.

barriers to intervention

Pursuing alternative aggressions in and out of the classroom can be


as treacherous for educators as it is for girls and parents. Pushed and
pulled by parents and administrators, working under vague or non-
existent anti-bullying policies, faced with impossibly high standards
and shrinking budgets, and exhausted and undercompensated, edu-
cators may be less inclined to discipline behavior that is often invis-
ible. It is not uncommon for public school classrooms to be crowded
with as many as thirty-five students. As Peggy Orenstein points out
in Schoolgirls, educators sometimes have only girls to thank for the
few moments of order in class. Girls have long played the straight
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man to the boys’ class clown; the American Association of University odd
Women has documented the dwarfing of girls’ voices in schools by girl
more rambunctious boys. It is precisely girls’ reputation for civility out
that provides the perfect cover for covert aggressors, giving them un-
restricted movement beneath the radar.94
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 psychologi-
cal 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 par-
ent, ‘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 physi-
cal 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
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odd where you’re not quite sure what’s going on,” Marilyn said. Later,
girl she added, “Parents are always watching you. They can be your best
out 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 de-
scribed 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 mat-
ter 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
339
want to keep for themselves.” She told me the story of a third grader odd
who became “hysterical” when her best friends stopped talking every girl
time she approached. She was devastated that her two best friends out
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 re-
spected their right to keep it. “They said it was private,” she explains.
Yet there is a difference between keeping information private be-
tween two people and flaunting the privacy itself. Making distinc-
tions like this one is critical to understanding how subtle the
aggression between girls can be.
There is a darker misunderstanding between educators and stu-
dents 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 gen-
erally 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
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odd this awful thing that girls do to each other,” she said, crossing her
girl legs and frowning. “I have been waiting twenty-five years for some-
out 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 per-
son 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 re-
called 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 ag-
gression 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 al-
ways 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 ed-


ucator who openly discusses its different forms. An educator may use
341
lessons with stories of children who experience alternative aggres- odd
sions. She may openly discuss her own history with bullying. He may girl
use instruction time to talk about the social dynamics of the class. out
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 au-
thority of an administrator. The decision to create a safe school cul-
ture 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. Al-
though 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 exis-
tence sends a clear signal to the community about the school’s core
values and priorities. Knowing a policy is in place authorizes educa-
tors to use their judgment with confidence as they manage their
classrooms. A good policy also stipulates protocol—that is, a system-
atic way of doing things—which lets the community know that cases
will be handled on their merits and rules applied consistently, with-
out 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 stu-
dents such as rumor spreading, alliance building, and severe episodes
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odd of nonverbal aggression. For example, it might acknowledge that in-
girl tentionally damaging another child’s relationships is a form of ac-
out tionable aggression.
Policy development should occur among individuals who repre-
sent 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 be-
havior 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 major-
ity 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 re-
main 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, cy-
berbullying follows you everywhere: home, to summer camp, to
Grandma’s house.
Increasingly, schools are arguing that students must be held ac-
countable for what happens off campus because of the school re-
sources 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
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Limber have written, “Students need to experience that adults in odd
your school will address bullying in roughly the same way, using the girl
same rules and similar guidelines for use of positive and negative out
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 as-
sume 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 inter-
vene, 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 aggres-
sion or rule breaking.
Imagine witnessing an act of aggression you have seen several
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odd times before—say, a nasty remark or one student shoving another.
girl What would you do? Most likely, you would follow a set of steps you
out have grown accustomed to in similar situations. Perhaps you would
stop the behavior, make sure the student is okay, send the offending
student to the assistant principal, and so on.
To respond to visible alternative aggressions, I recommend edu-
cators adopt some combination of these steps:
1. Stop the behavior and ensure the target is safe. As I have said else-
where in this book, some of the most aggressive girls are downright
angelic around adults. When confronted, many girls (and plenty of
boys) will revert to denial, or the claim they were “just kidding.”
The Olweus program advises staff to avoid giving students an op-
portunity to reject their interpretation of events. Instead of asking,
“What are you doing?” or “What did you just say?” don’t hesitate:
“I saw what you were doing and that is unacceptable behavior at this
school.” If girls reply that it was a joke—even if the target seems to
agree—hold your ground: “It doesn’t matter how you meant it.
What you said is not okay.”
2. Define the violation. When it comes to alternative aggressions,
you may need to explain why the behavior is considered wrong in
the first place. For example, some students may not understand that
threatening not to be someone’s friend, or convincing others not to
sit with a peer, is a form of aggression. It can be useful to compare
the behavior to one they already take seriously. “When you roll your
eyes at her every time she raises her hand, it’s hurtful. It’s like calling
her a mean name.”
When dealing with a group of girls, do not talk to them together.
Instead, speak to each one in quick succession,97 and do not allow
the girls to congregate outside an office while they wait (otherwise,
they may “get their stories straight”).
3. Outline the consequences, if any; OR refer the student to a disci-
plinary official. Every situation is different, so consequences will vary
depending on the circumstances. In addition, consequences do not
always have to be punitive. Students can be asked to complete writ-
345
ten reflection assignments that ask them to explain their action, its odd
impact, and their feelings about their behavior. Alternatively, you can girl
ask students to write a letter of apology to the target. The point is to out
not let the behavior go. Students should know that aggression comes
at a cost.
Since so much of girls’ aggression occurs without detection, de-
nial of bad behavior is rampant. Yet a she-said, she-said situation
does not necessarily mean you have to back down. Let’s say a student
has been implicated in using a nasty code name to describe another
girl. There is no proof, yet you feel pretty sure it happened. You can
tell the student you are not blaming her but still weigh in on the be-
havior itself: “Using a code name to talk about someone is really
hurtful, and it’s the kind of thing we don’t tolerate at this school.
Can you imagine how embarrassed and put down that girl would
feel if she found out?”
Then, you can talk about the “hypothetical” consequences for
engaging in the behavior, in the event someone is caught doing it:
“I just want you to know that if someone did do that, and I found
out, that person would definitely get a detention and phone call
home.”
New Jersey school counselor Kim Kaminski asks a clever question
when a girl denies wrongdoing or seems to withhold incriminating
information: “When I ask the other person about this, what do you
think she’s going to say?” The question, Kaminski says, can have a
fairly magical effect on quiet or stubborn girls.
If educators are uncertain about the limits of their permission to
intervene, they should be advised to ask the administrator responsi-
ble for discipline. Students can read the hesitation of staff. Adoles-
cent girls are exquisitely gifted at talking their way out of trouble,
and staff may back down as a result. Educators’ confidence will in-
crease with the knowledge that they are fully authorized to step in.
4. Communicate expectations for future positive behavior. Disci-
pline is rarely effective when its recipient is left feeling hopeless or
shamed. It is always important to give a student an opportunity to
346
odd redeem herself. This can be done by emphasizing a student’s prior
girl displays of good character, or by suggesting a specific action the stu-
out dent can take to correct the impression that has been left by her neg-
ative behavior.
This moment has the potential to become the point where a girl
is told to “be nice” to the other girl. Better, instead, to emphasize
the need for respect. “Nice” is a loaded word for girls. For adults,
“nice” means polite and respectful. To girls, “nice” means being
friends with that person. This is usually not feasible (or fair). More-
over, it is in part the pressure girls get to be “nice” that drives their
behavior underground in the first place. This is an opportunity to
talk with a girl about what respect means and looks like in practice.
Girls do not have to be friends with every student, but they do owe
their peers respect.
5. Report or record the incident. Research shows that when educa-
tors report bullying incidents, the situation is more likely to be ad-
dressed. If you are not already mandated by law to do so, require
staff to report aggressive incidents to the school counselor or assis-
tant principal. It is vitally important for incidents of bullying and ag-
gression to be flagged and moved to the top of an administrator’s
list. If too much time passes between a report and an intervention, it
may be too late to make an impact.
Each week a summary incident report can be circulated in writing
to staff or reviewed in a staff meeting. Reports do not always have to
lead to action; they can also serve as an information-sharing device
that activates support for a struggling student. For example, if an art
teacher reads a report that one of her students is being bullied, she
may reach out to the student, take care to recognize her work, or
offer to let her collaborate on a special project.
Every staff or team meeting should make time to review “red
flag” or struggling students. This evaluation needs to cover both
bullies and targets. When more educators are aware of who needs
help, they can work together and provide the necessary support or
discipline.

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