Sugar and Spice?

For girls, the worst bullies are often their best friends. Long aware of the symptoms of social aggression, educators are now trying to find the ingredients for a cure.

By Cindy Long

It was still dark outside when Danielle, a ninth-grader from a Philadelphia suburb, woke up surrounded by giggling and whispering girls. She was at a sleepover—a party she’d been looking forward to. Some of the girls held magic markers, others held tubes of paint. Two or three gripped camera phones. While she slept, the girls had squeezed paint into her hair and scribbled on her face, then snapped pictures of their handiwork. By the following Monday, the pictures had circulated to most of her classmates. If students didn’t receive them by e-mail or see them on the Internet, they found them pasted in the hallways throughout the school. Danielle was humiliated.

“I didn’t want to go back to school,” she says. “I couldn’t wait for the weekends. That was the only time there was nobody making fun of me. It was like, wherever I went, they knew—on the bus, at lunch, everywhere. My teachers couldn’t help me. All they did was let me leave a few minutes early from class so I could get to the next class without being teased in the hallways.”

For weeks, Danielle ate lunch alone in the library or in the nurse’s office, too ashamed to sit by herself in the cafeteria and face more harassment. “It was scary, frustrating, upsetting, and puzzling, because you’re wondering why [you’re] the one they have a problem with.” Normally, an upbeat, talkative teenager surrounded by girlfriends, Danielle began to withdraw, becoming quiet, depressed, and watchful. A victim of social aggression, the psychological wounds hurt as much, or even more deeply, as if she were punched in the face.

There are girls like Danielle at every school—girls who slink through the hallways with their heads down, trying to be invisible, hoping that some other girl will be singled out. Some argue that every girl is like Danielle at some point in her academic career. What woman doesn’t recall the sting of being snubbed by the popular girls? Or worse, by her so-called friends? The difference is that, back then, there wasn’t a name for the psychological torture girls can sometimes put each other through.

Sugar and Spice
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