Students quick to find new ways to hurt each other

By Tanya Bricking
Advertiser Staff Writer

Mary Kate Lennon fits the profile of a Nice Girl.

Hear a RealAudio clip of Sacred Hearts Academy freshman Mary Kate Lennon, 14, and sophomore Rosalyn Henry, 15, talk with reporter Tanya Brickling about some of the mean-spirited tactics that girls have used on each other Real player required.

Yet she has felt the pressure to dish dirt on her classmates. She has even been a victim of three-way calling, the novel use of technology that allows two girls to talk while a secret third girl listens in.

"That happened to me, like, twice," she said. "Someone called me. One of my friends was talking to me, and then all of a sudden asked me what I thought of one of my other friends. And I don't say anything bad about people, so I was like, 'Oh, she's nice' and stuff, you know? And then I heard, like, laughing in the background, and she was like, 'Oh, by the way, she's also on the phone with you.' "

Three-way calling is just one new tool in an age-old gossip-spreading network that has become part of every girl's rite of passage.

But parents, teachers and counselors today are paying closer attention to hurtful behavior that was brushed off before the days of political correctness and the Columbine shootings.

Researchers studying bullying used to focus on boys. Now, "relational aggression" is academic code for the cattiness schoolgirls hone into a skill.

"I think we're seeking it through a different prism," said Ruth Tschumy, an educational consultant for Hawai'i public and private schools and nonprofit organizations, who has written extensively about teasing and bullying. "It's always been there."

While academics disagree on whether girls are growing meaner, one thing is clear: Mean Girls are being talked about as if they are a social phenomenon. Everybody knows or remembers one from school.

Middle schoolers and teens instantly recognize the existence of Mean Girls. Many adults can still spot a few in the office. After years of focusing on the hidden culture of domestic violence, women are now reflecting on the power and pervasiveness of their own brand of social warfare.

"We're in a time in our country where it's vogue to be open and vocal," said Allana Coffee, a clinical therapist with Kaiser's Behavioral Health Services, who helps girls work through the trauma of manipulated friendships. "It's part of this day and age in America where we're looking at relationships and talking about these things."

Meanness defined

Discussion on the Mean Girl topic is growing beyond the school cafeteria. Mean Girls have hit popular culture even outside the world of Jerry Springer. A story with the headline "Girls Just Want to Be Mean" made the cover of The New York Times magazine in February. Response filled the airways on National Public Radio soon after that, and more on the subject is headed for bookstores near you with the spring premiere of books that explore surviving adolescence.

"I guess it's this underworld," said Rosalind Wiseman, the 33-year-old author of "Queen Bees & Wannabes: Helping Your Daughter Survive Cliques, Gossip, Boyfriends & Other Realities of Adolescence" (Crown, $24).

Wiseman, who was profiled in the New York Times story, holds bullying seminars at schools nationwide as president of the nonprofit Empower program. Even though her book won't be out until next month, she has already hit a nerve and has been getting calls from as far away as the Britain, Australia and Russia.

Part of her appeal is the way she has embraced Girl World and come up with names for the cliques, giving them labels such as Alpha Girls (the elite), RMGs (Really Mean Girls), Bankers, Messengers and Targets.

Chantel Sasaki, a Roosevelt High School senior, uses other names.

"You've got your Brainiacs and your Jocks," she said. "I'm like the dumb person who just hangs out with the smart ones. I'm like the mother helper. When I need to take charge, I take charge."

By now, 18-year-old Sasaki has found her tight group of friends in the Makiki public school. She says she has outgrown being a Mean Girl.

"I was mean in elementary," she said. "I'd go punching and teasing people. I used to swear a lot. It was little-kid stuff."

Somewhere into junior high and high school, girls' attempts at being sophisticated include finding new ways to run the rumor mill.

"The e-mails and instant messages, that's where most of the talking happens after school," said Rosalyn Henry, 15, a sophomore at Sacred Hearts, relaying a story about friends who sent a mean e-mail to a girl who didn't eat lunch with them one day, and the girl came to school the next day in tears.

"A big problem with the girls is we hold grudges, and then that will last forever," said Amanda Caravalho, 16, a Sacred Hearts sophomore. "Whereas guys, one fight or whatever and then that's it."

And a lasting problem is that mean girls never go away completely, said My Van Vo, 18, a Roosevelt senior.

"It's like a domino thing," Vo said. "If your friend doesn't like one person, you get behind your friend and you don't like the other person."

Even after high school, the experiences stick, said Pohai Vertido, 19, a 2000 graduate of St. Francis, an all-girl school in Manoa.

"Gossip is the worst," said Vertido, who now attends Hawai'i Pacific University. "Words are the worst."

Rachel Simmons, a 27-year-old journalist who has been on both sides of the popularity contest, has confronted those memories in adulthood in her research for the just-released book "Odd Girl Out: The Hidden Culture of Aggression In Girls" (Harcourt, $25).

Simmons interviewed young girls struggling with familiar conflicts and adult women who talked about spending their lives trying to repair whatever it was that caused the ostracism and punishment from their peers.

"Ultimately," she said, "I wanted other girls to realize that they're not alone."

Mini-melodramas

Miriam Slate can confirm that meanness is widespread.

Slate, foreign language department head at Sacred Hearts, polled each of her three sophomore classes to find out the meanest thing that happened to them or they did to someone else.

She learned about another mean technique: Leaving embarrassing messages on answering machines for parents to hear. Some of her students admitted to being victims or perpetrators of that tactic.

The makers of Secret Antiperspirant released results last month of a self-esteem study of 3,000 teens. Researchers found "an alarming increase of bullying among girls." Almost half of the teens who said they had been the targets of bullying were girls.

Secret's researchers said the most common type of bullying behavior among girls is verbal abuse, such as being teased about their appearance (64 percent of girls versus 58 percent of boys), and having false rumors spread about them (72 percent of girls versus 60 percent of boys).

But Slate and other critics of those calling Mean Girls a "new phenomenon" say the topic may just be filling a niche in bookstores' pop psychology sections. They hesitate to make mini-melodramas weightier than they really are.

"I don't think we should overblow it," said Victoria Jasparro, a Sacred Hearts junior high English and religion teacher. "We just have to always be aware that it does exist and try to intervene when it's in its early stages rather than just ignoring it and letting it blow up."

Hawai'i's public school system offers teachers a bullying prevention program, but not many teachers ask for it, said Adrienne Valdez, a labor education specialist at the Center for Labor Education and Research at the University of Hawai'i-West O'ahu.

Tschumy, the school consultant who writes about teasing and bullying, says it's progress that schools are spending time taking bullying seriously — especially among girls.

Manipulating friendships and purposely excluding others are real forms of bullying that have been ignored for too long, she said.

Girls realize that no adult can protect them from something even their daughters are bound to experience.

"You can't necessarily prevent it, but you can lessen the hurt or damage that's done," said Caravalho, the 16-year-old sophomore from Sacred Hearts. "It's just part of growing up."