A Parenting & kids forum. ParentingBanter.com

If this is your first visit, be sure to check out the FAQ by clicking the link above. You may have to register before you can post: click the register link above to proceed. To start viewing messages, select the forum that you want to visit from the selection below.

Go Back   Home » ParentingBanter.com forum » alt.parenting » Solutions
Site Map Home Authors List Search Today's Posts Mark Forums Read Web Partners

Tough Cookies: Girl Scouts launch a nationwide offensive against a spreading bully culture among young girls



 
 
Thread Tools Display Modes
  #1  
Old August 9th 07, 04:38 PM posted to rec.scouting.guide+girl,alt.feminism,soc.women,misc.kids,alt.parenting.solutions
Fred Goodwin, CMA
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 227
Default Tough Cookies: Girl Scouts launch a nationwide offensive against a spreading bully culture among young girls

Tough Cookies: Girl Scouts launch a nationwide offensive against a
spreading bully culture among young girls

http://www.chicagotribune.com/features/magazine/chi-
mxa0722magmeangrrljul22,0,5529518.story
http://tinyurl.com/2jjl8y

BY JESSICA REAVES
July 22, 2007

My personal experience with the Girl Scouts is, at best, limited. None
of my friends was a member, so there were no uniforms to covet.
Exactly once a year I became sharply aware of the Scouts' existence--
during the annual cookie sale, when Thin Mints were briefly elevated
to food-group status. Otherwise, I dimly (and imprudently)
acknowledged them as a relic of the 1950s, caught up in dated gender
roles and archaic activities.

Perhaps that's my loss. The Girl Scouts, it turns out, might have kept
me from answering the siren call of the Mean Girl: Once upon a time, I
was one of Them.

It wasn't a conscious thing; I didn't wake up one day and think,
"Gosh, today I'd like to make another girl's life really, really
miserable by saying cruel things about her shoes and then ignoring her
on the playground." It just kind of happened. I wasn't looking to be
mean; I was trying to maintain my tenuous grasp on my place in the
social pecking order, and the only way my 9-year-old brain knew how to
do that was by calling another girl, whose social standing was even
more tenuous than mine, "a big nerd." And then I told her she had ugly
hair and that her shoes smelled.

I wasn't the only one who made this girl's life unbearable. The 4th
grade was teeming with Mean Girls, each of us more insecure than the
next. And so, like carrion birds, we circled our weakest member and
pecked the living daylights out of her. I can't recall this phase of
my life without blushing with shame. I'm a feminist, after all, raised
by feminist parents and, like a lot of girls today, carefully schooled
in the philosophy of inclusion, tolerance and generally not being
awful to other people. And still, I turned into a vicious little
person for a full school year.

There's cold comfort in the knowledge that I'm not alone. Name-calling
and sudden, inexplicable banishment to social Siberia play out across
the country every day. In classrooms, at birthday parties, at summer
camps, on sports teams, girls are constantly sharpening their
interpersonal claws, seeking new ways to exclude and manipulate each
other. Despite mounting anecdotal evidence--as well as movies, songs
and books dedicated to the topic of Mean Girls--there is no scientific
consensus on whether girls have actually undergone a gender-wide,
biological shift toward cruelty. It's possible they are simply
responding, superficially, to a less generous, faster-paced, more
cutthroat society by disposing of long-standing social expectations
("sugar and spice and all things nice") and behaving more like . . .
boys. Or maybe worse than boys.

Rosalind Wiseman, author of the best-selling "Queen Bees and
Wannabes," is unconvinced that girls are much different today than
they were 50 or even 100 years ago. "Girls have always been
relationally aggressive," Wiseman says. She believes parents, many of
whom are geared up to see danger or threats wherever they look, are
more willing than ever to excuse hostile behavior in their children.

One thing is certain: Over the past decade, the ubiquity of e-mail,
instant messaging and cell phones has made things far easier for
bullies who use words and innuendo as their weapons. And even as girls
make spectacular strides in academics, eclipsing their male classmates
on tests and in the college-admissions game, they're surpassing boys
in other ways that none of the "Reviving Ophelia" crowd could have
expected, or certainly would have hoped for. Girls, according to a
Clemson University study, are nearly twice as likely to bully or be
bullied electronically than boys; another long-term study shows girls
are responsible for 61 percent of reported in-person bullying
incidents.

Making matters worse, physical violence, once the domain of boys, has
thoroughly infiltrated girl culture. The U.S. Justice Department
reports that between 1992 and 2003, the number of girls arrested for
assault rose by 41 percent. Among boys, the increase was 4.3 percent.

Clearly, girls and the people who love them are facing a crisis.
Physical, emotional or psychological injuries can end a friendship,
ruin a school year or, in extreme circumstances, prompt a suicide
attempt. Parents and teachers are at wits' end. What can we do to
curb, or reverse, the disturbing rise of the Mean Girl? Enter the Girl
Scouts.

When Juliette Gordon Low founded the Girl Scouts in 1912, she
envisioned an organization that would provide girls "an alternative to
being either married or in the factories." One of the country's first
female aviators, Low wasn't interested in promoting traditional roles
for girls or women. One of the first merit badges available to a Girl
Scout was not sewing or baking or any of the other "womanly arts," but
for telegraphy.

Nearly a century later, Low's progressive fervor has largely been
forgotten by the non-Scouting public. "We have a certain image,"
concedes Brooke Wiseman (no relation to Rosalind Wiseman), former CEO
of the Girl Scouts of Chicago and current CEO of Girl Scouts of
Greater Chicago and Northwest Indiana, acknowledging the old-
fashioned, goody-two-shoes stereotype that still haunts today's
Scouts. "We're working hard to counteract it. We want to be recognized
for what we really do. We're building girls of courage, confidence and
character."

That has meant facing up to some hard truths. Though membership has
held steady over the years at about 3.6 million in the U.S., many
Scout leaders felt the organization was losing touch with members who
needed it most and losing relevance in the eyes of potential members.
The results of a two-year study completed in 2003 by the Girl Scouts
Research Institute confirmed the concerns: A majority of girls said
adults weren't acknowledging some of their greatest fears, and two of
the top three were verbal bullying and teasing.

The numbers propelled the issue to the top of the Girl Scouts' to-do
list. "Girls told us they weren't feeling physically unsafe, but
emotionally unsafe, and that adult supervision was nowhere to be
found," says Courtney Shore, vice president of communications for Girl
Scouts of the USA. "We're trying to raise awareness among adults so
they can recognize signs of bullying and step in."

The Girl Scouts, with their large national presence, are in a prime
position to challenge the Mean Girl paradigm. They aren't the only
ones who've noticed a surge in bad-girl behavior; scores of workshops
and events, including the Empower Program at Mt. Holyoke College,
created by "Odd Girl Out" author Rachel Simmons, are popping up across
the country.

But as the Girl Scouts leadership sees it, their curricula have the
potential to make an entire generation of girls more aware of teasing
and bullying and, in theory, give them the tools to stop it from doing
any more harm. For Chicago Girl Scouts, that means identifying and
contending with the social habits of the 13,500 Girl Scouts who make
up the area's 800 troops, the largest council in the country.

Most people remember high school as the most socially loaded years of
their lives (The lunch table dramas! The sting of dateless proms! The
nerds being stuffed into lockers!). But today the most aggressive
ostracizing and clique-forming begins in middle school. According to
the Girl Scouts Research study, pre-teen girls ages 8 to 12, or
Juniors in Girl Scouts parlance, named "being teased or made fun of"
as their top concern.

"Our program is age-differentiated, which is very deliberate," says
Shore. "We . . . need to make sure our messages are relevant in their
lives, that they're not being treated like little girls when they're
in middle school." Anti-teasing and bully-prevention programs are
geared to each of the five Scout levels.

For example, programs for older Scouts (Cadettes, ages 11-14 and
Seniors, 14-17) include "Take Charge," a violence-prevention program,
and "Uniquely Me," which aims to bolster self-esteem and tolerance of
differences. The younger Scouts (Daisies, who are 5 and 6; Brownies,
ages 6-8; and Juniors, who use a combination of the curricula for
older and younger girls) are steered toward "Why Tease?," a glossy, 12-
page picture book produced in 2002 by four Chicago Senior Scouts. It
tells the story of Mousy, whose quiet demeanor puts off the other
kids, until one of them realizes they can, in fact, all play together.

Julie Piwowarczyk is one of the authors of "Why Tease?," which earned
her a Gold Award, an elite designation similar to Eagle Scout in the
Boy Scouts. Piwowarczyk, who graduated this spring from Marquette
University, remembers sitting down with her co-writers, trying to come
up with a subject worth tackling.

"We were talking about school shootings, and someone mentioned that
the shooters had been bullied or teased a lot," she says. "Someone
very close to me was bullied by other boys for a couple of years."
Eventually, the teasing got to a point that her friend had to transfer
schools. "I felt really strongly about teaching kids that teasing
isn't funny, that it can be really serious."

The topic proved a natural fit for the Gold Award project. "Teasing is
something we'd all dealt with and could relate to," explains
Piwowarczyk. Their group leader suggested they make a book and a Girl
Scout patch to go with it. Patches, like badges, are a major part of
the Scout experience, but unlike badges, which members earn by
accomplishing specific tasks and acquiring new skills, patches are
given for more subjective learning activities.

To earn the "Why Tease?" patch, girls must address a series of talking
points, such as, "In the Girl Scout Law it says that you promise to be
a 'sister to every Girl Scout.' Does this apply only to other Girl
Scouts? What would you do to make sure that you are being a sister to
everyone on the playground?" "Draw a picture of your friends. Name one
person not in your picture that you will try to include during recess
or free time."

The exercise is self-administered, Piwowarczyk says. "We want members
to reflect on the issues and answer questions for themselves."

But tying social conduct to quantitative rewards like patches raises
the question of how a leader knows if someone "gets it," or is simply
parroting back "correct" responses. Unlike other patch-worthy
achievements, like building a Web page, mastering the "Why Tease?"
message is hard to measure. How a girl responds in real life, experts
say, when they're surrounded by friends and classmates, not teachers
and Scout leaders, is the only test of a program's success.

"This can't be about getting a patch. It needs to be about learning
behaviors," says Rosalind Wiseman. She generally applauds the Girl
Scouts' efforts, but warns against the temptation to rely on
formulaic, one-size-fits-all "solutions."

Of course, whether from personal experience or watching Lindsay
Lohan's hapless outsider in the film "Mean Girls" suffer humiliation
at the hands of the "Plastics," or cringing as the high school in
"Heathers" descends into anarchy, any girl knows that changing
behaviors isn't easy when you believe your very existence depends on
acting a certain way.

In reporting this story, I asked a wide variety of girls about teasing
and being mean. As I listened to their stories, which ranged from
horrific to merely annoying experiences, a common thread emerged: It's
rare for any girl to spend her entire school career as prey or
predator. Kids grow up, allegiances shift, and this year's Mean Girl
is a hair's breadth away from becoming the next victim, cowed by the
vicious pronouncements of the latest ruler of the Girl Realm.

Dianna Daniel, a soft-faced 19-year-old who spent 12 years in the Girl
Scouts, is now a junior leader for a troop of 8-to-11-year-olds.
Articulate and soft-spoken, the North Side native will begin her
second year at Truman College this fall. She wears her brown hair
pulled into a ponytail and her left ear is lined with jewelry; a
tongue stud flashes as she speaks.

"I think the teasing starts in 3rd grade," she says. "I was guilty of
bullying when I was in the 3rd grade because I looked up to my older
sister, and she knew what was cool and what wasn't. So I figured I
knew everything." And she let everyone know it.

By the time Daniel got to Lake View High School, the tables had
turned. "I was a special-education student, so I got a lot of teasing
and bullying because of that," she says. "I never felt safe, no matter
how much security was there. I'm 18, I'm in college, and I still deal
with people making comments and bullying." Her new defense is silence:
Just ignore it, because letting it get to you is what the bullies
want.

As a junior leader, Daniel does her best to pass along her hard-earned
wisdom to the girls in her troop. She says she's astonished by how
mean the teasing can be, even among girls as young as 8. "I don't
remember there being as much teasing when I was that age," Daniel
says. "Even during our meetings, some girls will tease each other, and
you have to pull them aside and tell them, 'You can't do that. This is
supposed to be a safe place.' "

What do the girls tease each other about? Everything and nothing,
Daniel says. Everything from wardrobe choices to crayon technique is
fair game. Some of it is just kids jostling for attention, she says,
but some of it is "definitely meant to be mean," and some of the
interactions are tinged with something more menacing than spite.
"They're a lot more aggressive." Daniel says. "I remember when I was
in school, someone would make fun of me in a normal-sounding voice.
But now you can tell there's a lot of anger there." Daniel pauses, and
shakes her head. "It's scary to me."

Daniel and others interviewed declined to elaborate on the taunts and
threats they'd received or overhead. But a quick troll through several
Web logs reveals a fairly universal Mean Girl language, which
occasionally flirts with real viciousness or threats of violence, but
usually sticks close to a prearranged script. From the message boards
of YM magazine: "like i'll just be minding my own business and her and
her stupid friends come up right beside me and be like omg, shes so
ugly. omg, look at her clothes. omg, this. omg that. i kinda want to
punch them in their faces. cause no one looks perfect every freaking
day. its been going on for like 2 years now."

Thirteen-year-old Kelly Sineni could be a poster child for well-
adjusted adolescence. A Girl Scout and 8th grader at Smyser School on
the Northwest Side, Sineni represents a tiny sub-category of middle-
school girls. Although acutely aware of Mean Girls and their methods,
she seems to be remarkably unaffected by them.

"It all started in the 5th grade," she says. "Girls started saying
mean things about each other, starting rumors talking about what
people were wearing." While boys' fights quickly turn physical, "Girls
seem to hold grudges and want to get revenge." Asked if she ever
confronted bullying, Sineni pauses to think. "I used to go to day
camp," she recalls. "One girl would say these really mean things to
another girl, who was quiet. I just told her to stop picking on her. I
stood up." Was she scared? "No, not really," says Sineni. "I knew the
[mean] girl."

She also knew how to express herself without escalating the situation,
a skill she says she learned from the Girl Scouts. "I'll always go to
my Girl Scout leaders," when overwhelmed by an interpersonal problem,
Sineni says. "They help us resolve things. Or I'd talk to my best
friends, and they're all in Girl Scouts."

Demographically, the Girl Scouts organization is undergoing seismic
shifts, creating a new audience for its programs and extending the
organization's reach well beyond its roots in white, middle-class
suburbia. The Chicago Scouts, for example, are an impressively diverse
group. According to 2005 figures, membership is 38 percent white, 38
percent black and 1 percent Asian. At least 20 percent of members did
not report their race.

Within those numbers, another trend is emerging. Latina membership in
the Girl Scouts surged 22 percent between 2003 and 2006. It's not
surprising, then, that the Chicago Girl Scouts would find a warm
welcome at Eli Whitney Elementary School. The Scouts have worked with
the school, in the Little Village neighborhood, for 17 years.
Whitney's student population is 99 percent Hispanic, and some of the
youngest kids don't speak much English.

Four evenings a week, as many as 100 girls, ages 5 to 13, come to the
school for lectures, activities and games. These meetings, like those
in 23 other Chicago Public Schools, represent a partnership between
local community groups and the Girl Scouts, which brings after-school
programs, including Scouting, to some 900 girls in Chicago's low-
income, under-served communities. Simone Alexander, a coordinator for
the Little Village Community Development Corporation, oversees the
scouting activities at Whitney. The impact of the program on bullying
and teasing is hard to measure, she says, but she has seen progress at
the grade-school level. "I'd say the program functions best for the
younger girls, those in 1st to 5th grades. By the time girls are in
6th grade, they relate differently to each other."

The 100-year-old school building, which anchors a neighborhood dotted
with bodegas and streets lined with neat, single-family homes, is
clearly showing its age. The cheerful decorations and bright murals
can't quite dispel the dreariness of the Whitney basement, the
fluorescent lights and the dampness hovering over the carefully
aligned lunch tables where 50 girls are seated, talking and giggling.

Some of the younger kids are drawing, carefully plucking crayons from
a pile in the middle of their table. This is the Girl Scout troop for
some 100 girls, all students at Eli Whitney, many of them referred to
the program by their principal, Dr. Miguel Velazquez. Renee Knight,
45, has been working with the Scouts for three years and has seen
every variety of bullying, teasing and name-calling.

"It starts young," she says, shaking her head. "One girl said
something mean to another girl, who started crying. They were in
kindergarten." Among the youngest girls, Knight says, the bullying is
completely arbitrary ("She's my friend, not yours"; "You can't use
that color, because that's my color."). It's an accurate predictor of
the capricious, unpredictable rules of social survival that govern the
middle-school years. ("You can only wear jeans on Monday"; "Ponytails
are only for Thursdays.")

As Knight hurries off to secure the peace and the evening's activities
continue, a few girls approach me. Some, like 12-year-old Yesenia
Savanas and Stephanie Moncayo, 13, both 7th-graders at Eli Whitney,
are eager to chat.

I ask them if they see bullying at their school. They both nod.
"There's punching, and name-calling," Yesenia says. "The girls call
each other bad names and talk about each other." What about the boys?
"Boys hit each other, because they think it's an easier way to solve a
problem," says Stephanie.

The girls took part in the Take Charge! program run by the Girl Scouts
of Chicago and the Chicago Bar Association. Designed to promote non-
violent conflict resolution, the joint venture targeted girls in
middle and high schools on the city's Near West Side, Garfield Park,
Lawndale and Lower West Side. Stephanie said it provided a forum for a
difficult subject. "Sometimes it's hard to talk to friends about
[bullying and teasing] because they don't understand."

Nine-year-old Ashley Chavez, a quiet girl who smiles from under a
thick veil of dark hair, says that "when girls get mad they use bad
words. And sometimes they will sit at a different lunch table even
though they were best friends." Has she ever been bullied? She nods.

"When I was in preschool," she begins in her soft voice, "there was a
girl who was taller than me, and she told me I was too little to hang
out with her." Ashley stops, looking up at me to make sure I'm
listening. "So I told her that everyone is small sometimes, and who
cares if people are big or small, they're still our friends."

Along with other 8-to-12-year-old girls, Ashley took part in the Girl
Scouts' "Uniquely Me" program, which tries to promotes self-esteem.
The theory is that high self-esteem is a useful tool in counteracting
bullying behavior and makes girls less likely to be bullies
themselves.

Self-esteem is a kind of Holy Grail of Scouting and similar
organizations. Which is great, up to a point, says Rosalind Wiseman,
the author. "We all want strong daughters," she affirms, "but there
are a lot of mean, mean girls who have incredibly high self-esteem. I
tell girls I talk to that I don't care if they're friends with each
other, but they have a responsibility to treat each other with
dignity."

At Whitney and other schools nationwide, a now-familiar threat to
civility has emerged: Cell phones, ubiquitous and, increasingly,
infinitesimal, can be smuggled into just about any classroom or
meeting. Set on silent mode, they're nearly impossible to ferret out.
That's also bad news for teachers, who can hardly expect their lesson

plans to compete with riveting text-message discussions of Amanda's
new hair color, or how hot Ben is or how, like, heinous Sara's skirt
looks.

It's also bad news for girls, according to one recent study by the
University of California-Davis, which found female bullies were
increasingly using text messaging--more than the Internet or physical
confrontations--to torment their victims.

And then there's the siren song of the incoming call. "Talking on the
phone has become a real issue," Renee Knight says. "In the middle of
class or a meeting, a phone will vibrate. They'll always say they
'have to' answer it but I tell them, if it's between 6 and 8 p.m.
[meeting time] and it's not an emergency, they don't answer it."

Meanwhile, text-messaging has eliminated any need to answer the phone,
she notes wryly. "They text the boys during the meetings," Knight
shakes her head. "Just letting them know who's here and who's not."

Cyber-bullying has expanded the reach of Mean Girls exponentially,
agrees Courtney Shore. "Even if phones are off while they're in a
classroom, they can still be used as cameras," she says. "And it's
become the norm among kids to put up fake MySpace pages to make fun of
other kids.

"Odd Girl Out" author Rachel Simmons is the director of The Girls'
Leadership Institute and the Empower Program, which runs workshops for
girls and their mothers. Their motto: "Violence shouldn't be a rite of
passage."

Simmons' expertise on the topic isn't entirely academic. When she was
8, her friends started telling lies about her and ran away from her,
and she had no one to sit with at lunch.

Later, she stood on the other side of the bullying fence. "At 14, I
was a total wannabe," she recalls. "I was popular but always on the
margins. I hurt a friend of mine," in cahoots with another girl, "by
ending our friendship. This caused her so much pain that she left the
school."

She notes that before the wired age, a student could write something
on the bathroom wall and perhaps 10 people would see it before it got
washed off. "Today," she says, "you can spread a rumor or a picture
with the press of a button. Delete buttons and cache-clearing erase
all signs of a bully's handiwork after the damage is done."

"It's this invisible force," says Courtney Shore. "Kids don't know who
or what to fight back against."

The Internet also has introduced a lack of impulse control when it
comes to bullying, says Simmons. "You can't see anyone's face as
you're typing. So you have this immediate gratification of satisfying
your instincts" without having to deal with the real-time

consequences.

Rosalind Wiseman believes that cyber-bullying is sometimes exacerbated
by parents' good intentions. "Parents are giving their children cell
phones because they want them to be safe. They think the world is this
really scary place." But rather than keep girls safe, she says, the
phones provide "a way for girls to destroy or be destroyed. Girls take
pictures of a girl they hate in the locker room after gym class, and
text them to all her friends with these really vicious messages, like
'You're a big fat skank and everyone hates you.' "

But in some cases, blogs and online message boards are used to
challenge the supremacy of Mean Girls. Message boards at
call4ally.com, a blog staffed by a girl named Ally and her mother, a
former marketing executive, included this post from LuckyCharm: "I was
thinking . . . who put mean girls in charge? I'm so tierd [sic] of
them getting what they want! Why do we let them rule? How can we stop
them? What if nice girls ruled vs. mean girls? How can we make that
happen? Am I dreaming? Got any ideas on how to stop mean girls?"

A response from TexasIdeas: "Sure. Surefire solutions? Not so much."

Everyone, including the Girl Scout leadership, agrees that solutions
are not in the cards right now. There are too many variables at play--
including race, class, age, geography--in the Mean Girl epidemic for
there to be a single cure.

But there are innovative, independent programs springing up all over
the country, including "Chicks and Cliques," in the D.C. suburb of
Park Lawn, and Simmons' Empower Program. And that's as it should be,
according to Scouts leader Sho "We're studying this issue as we go.
We're not saying we have the answers."

She'll get no argument from author and educator Wiseman, who views the
Scouts' programs favorably but offers a few caveats. First, she says,
it's important for the Scouts to be aware that their own leaders are
susceptible to this Mean Girl behavior.

"The dynamic of the Girl Scouts makes this a particular issue. Some
troops have co-leaders, which can lead to difficult power struggles,
and then there are mothers who lead troops that include their
daughters." That's a situation, she contends, that can lead to
preferential treatment--"Queen Bee" Moms enabling their "Queen Bee"
daughters--or sweeping problems under the rug.

Parents in general, she notes, want to believe that "[They] have these
perfect children who are so nice and want to be friends" with
everyone, and most parents will defend their children against every
accusation, no matter what evidence they're presented with.

"Just as it's 100 percent predictable that parents will disbelieve
other adults who talk about their kids, it's 100 percent predictable
that parents will believe their children more than any claim against
them."

The lesson for parents, she says, is that they have to be good models.
"Otherwise, girls are going to say, 'Yeah, yeah, we're supposed to be
nice to each other, but look at the way the adults are acting.' The
same goes for teachers in schools." And, of course, troop leaders.

To those Girl Scout leaders, Wiseman offers this advice: Stay engaged
in the day-to-day challenges, however harsh, in girls' lives. "I've
worked with the Girl Scouts," she says. "I'm very challenging with
them about creating substantive programs."

She worries that, despite the talk of age-appropriateness and
relevancy, the Scouts, like any other large organization, run the risk
of implementing programs that are too broad or not geared specifically
enough to the realities of members' lives.

Meanwhile, I've resigned myself to the fact that Mean Girls will never
disappear completely. Social Darwinism, which is simply a fancy term
for people walking all over each other, may be, for better or worse,
intrinsic to the human condition.

But that's not to say I don't think things can't get better. If the
Girl Scouts, or any other organization brave enough to take on the
problem, can keep one girl from teasing, taunting or picking on
another, they'll have my deepest admiration.

As well as the gratitude of millions of little girls who are just now
testing the social waters of elementary school, blithely unaware of
the piranhas lurking just below the surface.

--

TIPS FOR PARENTS

Whether you're worried about your daughter's behavior, or just want to
keep an eye on her group's delicate social dynamics, the key is to
stay involved, listen and keep the lines of communication open. But
when is it time to call in professional help?

Dr. Suzanne McNeill (PhD), a clinical psychologist in Chicago with a
private practice specializing in adolescents, offers parents this
advice:

Q: What are some signs that my daughter is being teased or bullied?

A: If you notice your daughter starting to avoid social situations or
not wanting to go to school, those are pretty clear indications that
something's going on.

Also, look out for new physical complaints with no clear underlying
physical problem, such as stomachaches. Also nightmares and loss of
concentration. Sometimes girls who are being bullied start to tease or
bully their younger siblings or start talking to their parents in
bullying tones.

Q: What can I do to help her?

A: One of the difficulties in addressing bullying or teasing with your
daughter is that when girls are being victimized, their sense of shame
and humiliation is so enormous that they will often deny any problem.
Usually by the time they volunteer any information, they're so injured
and mortified that parents need to react quickly, first by reassuring
their child that the bullying isn't about them--it's about the
insecurities of the bully.

It often helps if parents can look back on their own experiences with
bullies, especially if a mom can say, "I remember this happening to
me." It can really help to know that people do get through this.

I tend to caution moms that while you feel sad and angry, and you want
to show your daughter that you empathize, you don't want her to feel
that she has upset you by revealing what's going on in her life.

Q: What behaviors can I chalk up as "normal," and when is it time to
call in a professional, for example a psychologist or therapist?

The difference between "normal" behavior and behavior that needs to be
addressed lies in whether anyone is getting hurt.

If that's the case, therapy can be helpful in that, by telling their
story over and over, girls often find the words become less painful,
less raw. There's a certain power in telling someone what's happening
to you and having them empathize and support your reaction.

Q: Should I contact someone at my daughter's school--an administrator
or teacher--if I suspect bullying is going on there?

Yes, if teasing and bullying are going on, the school should know
about it. But you need to tell a counselor or administrator or a
teacher who can deal with it without identifying the bully. That's
just going to make the target more vulnerable.

Q: What are some signs my daughter has become a Mean Girl? How should
I deal with this behavior?

Parents might hear from other parents or from the school that their
daughter is bullying someone. Girls who are bullies are often socially
savvy enough to behave in a certain way around adults, so you may not
see anything firsthand. Often, kids who are bullies are depressed or
angry, just like their targets.

If your daughter is victimizing someone, you need to be clear with her
that the bullying behavior is disappointing and unacceptable, and that
you're not going to tolerate her treating someone badly.

  #2  
Old August 10th 07, 10:21 AM posted to rec.scouting.guide+girl,alt.feminism,soc.women,misc.kids,alt.parenting.solutions
[email protected]
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 11
Default Tough Cookies: Girl Scouts launch a nationwide offensive against a spreading bully culture among young girls

So the Girl Scouts is going to attack the bigoted Boy Scouts?

On Thu, 09 Aug 2007 08:38:08 -0700, "Fred Goodwin, CMA"
wrote:

Tough Cookies: Girl Scouts launch a nationwide offensive against a
spreading bully culture among young girls

http://www.chicagotribune.com/features/magazine/chi-
mxa0722magmeangrrljul22,0,5529518.story
http://tinyurl.com/2jjl8y

BY JESSICA REAVES
July 22, 2007

My personal experience with the Girl Scouts is, at best, limited. None
of my friends was a member, so there were no uniforms to covet.
Exactly once a year I became sharply aware of the Scouts' existence--
during the annual cookie sale, when Thin Mints were briefly elevated
to food-group status. Otherwise, I dimly (and imprudently)
acknowledged them as a relic of the 1950s, caught up in dated gender
roles and archaic activities.

Perhaps that's my loss. The Girl Scouts, it turns out, might have kept
me from answering the siren call of the Mean Girl: Once upon a time, I
was one of Them.

It wasn't a conscious thing; I didn't wake up one day and think,
"Gosh, today I'd like to make another girl's life really, really
miserable by saying cruel things about her shoes and then ignoring her
on the playground." It just kind of happened. I wasn't looking to be
mean; I was trying to maintain my tenuous grasp on my place in the
social pecking order, and the only way my 9-year-old brain knew how to
do that was by calling another girl, whose social standing was even
more tenuous than mine, "a big nerd." And then I told her she had ugly
hair and that her shoes smelled.

I wasn't the only one who made this girl's life unbearable. The 4th
grade was teeming with Mean Girls, each of us more insecure than the
next. And so, like carrion birds, we circled our weakest member and
pecked the living daylights out of her. I can't recall this phase of
my life without blushing with shame. I'm a feminist, after all, raised
by feminist parents and, like a lot of girls today, carefully schooled
in the philosophy of inclusion, tolerance and generally not being
awful to other people. And still, I turned into a vicious little
person for a full school year.

There's cold comfort in the knowledge that I'm not alone. Name-calling
and sudden, inexplicable banishment to social Siberia play out across
the country every day. In classrooms, at birthday parties, at summer
camps, on sports teams, girls are constantly sharpening their
interpersonal claws, seeking new ways to exclude and manipulate each
other. Despite mounting anecdotal evidence--as well as movies, songs
and books dedicated to the topic of Mean Girls--there is no scientific
consensus on whether girls have actually undergone a gender-wide,
biological shift toward cruelty. It's possible they are simply
responding, superficially, to a less generous, faster-paced, more
cutthroat society by disposing of long-standing social expectations
("sugar and spice and all things nice") and behaving more like . . .
boys. Or maybe worse than boys.

Rosalind Wiseman, author of the best-selling "Queen Bees and
Wannabes," is unconvinced that girls are much different today than
they were 50 or even 100 years ago. "Girls have always been
relationally aggressive," Wiseman says. She believes parents, many of
whom are geared up to see danger or threats wherever they look, are
more willing than ever to excuse hostile behavior in their children.

One thing is certain: Over the past decade, the ubiquity of e-mail,
instant messaging and cell phones has made things far easier for
bullies who use words and innuendo as their weapons. And even as girls
make spectacular strides in academics, eclipsing their male classmates
on tests and in the college-admissions game, they're surpassing boys
in other ways that none of the "Reviving Ophelia" crowd could have
expected, or certainly would have hoped for. Girls, according to a
Clemson University study, are nearly twice as likely to bully or be
bullied electronically than boys; another long-term study shows girls
are responsible for 61 percent of reported in-person bullying
incidents.

Making matters worse, physical violence, once the domain of boys, has
thoroughly infiltrated girl culture. The U.S. Justice Department
reports that between 1992 and 2003, the number of girls arrested for
assault rose by 41 percent. Among boys, the increase was 4.3 percent.

Clearly, girls and the people who love them are facing a crisis.
Physical, emotional or psychological injuries can end a friendship,
ruin a school year or, in extreme circumstances, prompt a suicide
attempt. Parents and teachers are at wits' end. What can we do to
curb, or reverse, the disturbing rise of the Mean Girl? Enter the Girl
Scouts.

When Juliette Gordon Low founded the Girl Scouts in 1912, she
envisioned an organization that would provide girls "an alternative to
being either married or in the factories." One of the country's first
female aviators, Low wasn't interested in promoting traditional roles
for girls or women. One of the first merit badges available to a Girl
Scout was not sewing or baking or any of the other "womanly arts," but
for telegraphy.

Nearly a century later, Low's progressive fervor has largely been
forgotten by the non-Scouting public. "We have a certain image,"
concedes Brooke Wiseman (no relation to Rosalind Wiseman), former CEO
of the Girl Scouts of Chicago and current CEO of Girl Scouts of
Greater Chicago and Northwest Indiana, acknowledging the old-
fashioned, goody-two-shoes stereotype that still haunts today's
Scouts. "We're working hard to counteract it. We want to be recognized
for what we really do. We're building girls of courage, confidence and
character."

That has meant facing up to some hard truths. Though membership has
held steady over the years at about 3.6 million in the U.S., many
Scout leaders felt the organization was losing touch with members who
needed it most and losing relevance in the eyes of potential members.
The results of a two-year study completed in 2003 by the Girl Scouts
Research Institute confirmed the concerns: A majority of girls said
adults weren't acknowledging some of their greatest fears, and two of
the top three were verbal bullying and teasing.

The numbers propelled the issue to the top of the Girl Scouts' to-do
list. "Girls told us they weren't feeling physically unsafe, but
emotionally unsafe, and that adult supervision was nowhere to be
found," says Courtney Shore, vice president of communications for Girl
Scouts of the USA. "We're trying to raise awareness among adults so
they can recognize signs of bullying and step in."

The Girl Scouts, with their large national presence, are in a prime
position to challenge the Mean Girl paradigm. They aren't the only
ones who've noticed a surge in bad-girl behavior; scores of workshops
and events, including the Empower Program at Mt. Holyoke College,
created by "Odd Girl Out" author Rachel Simmons, are popping up across
the country.

But as the Girl Scouts leadership sees it, their curricula have the
potential to make an entire generation of girls more aware of teasing
and bullying and, in theory, give them the tools to stop it from doing
any more harm. For Chicago Girl Scouts, that means identifying and
contending with the social habits of the 13,500 Girl Scouts who make
up the area's 800 troops, the largest council in the country.

Most people remember high school as the most socially loaded years of
their lives (The lunch table dramas! The sting of dateless proms! The
nerds being stuffed into lockers!). But today the most aggressive
ostracizing and clique-forming begins in middle school. According to
the Girl Scouts Research study, pre-teen girls ages 8 to 12, or
Juniors in Girl Scouts parlance, named "being teased or made fun of"
as their top concern.

"Our program is age-differentiated, which is very deliberate," says
Shore. "We . . . need to make sure our messages are relevant in their
lives, that they're not being treated like little girls when they're
in middle school." Anti-teasing and bully-prevention programs are
geared to each of the five Scout levels.

For example, programs for older Scouts (Cadettes, ages 11-14 and
Seniors, 14-17) include "Take Charge," a violence-prevention program,
and "Uniquely Me," which aims to bolster self-esteem and tolerance of
differences. The younger Scouts (Daisies, who are 5 and 6; Brownies,
ages 6-8; and Juniors, who use a combination of the curricula for
older and younger girls) are steered toward "Why Tease?," a glossy, 12-
page picture book produced in 2002 by four Chicago Senior Scouts. It
tells the story of Mousy, whose quiet demeanor puts off the other
kids, until one of them realizes they can, in fact, all play together.

Julie Piwowarczyk is one of the authors of "Why Tease?," which earned
her a Gold Award, an elite designation similar to Eagle Scout in the
Boy Scouts. Piwowarczyk, who graduated this spring from Marquette
University, remembers sitting down with her co-writers, trying to come
up with a subject worth tackling.

"We were talking about school shootings, and someone mentioned that
the shooters had been bullied or teased a lot," she says. "Someone
very close to me was bullied by other boys for a couple of years."
Eventually, the teasing got to a point that her friend had to transfer
schools. "I felt really strongly about teaching kids that teasing
isn't funny, that it can be really serious."

The topic proved a natural fit for the Gold Award project. "Teasing is
something we'd all dealt with and could relate to," explains
Piwowarczyk. Their group leader suggested they make a book and a Girl
Scout patch to go with it. Patches, like badges, are a major part of
the Scout experience, but unlike badges, which members earn by
accomplishing specific tasks and acquiring new skills, patches are
given for more subjective learning activities.

To earn the "Why Tease?" patch, girls must address a series of talking
points, such as, "In the Girl Scout Law it says that you promise to be
a 'sister to every Girl Scout.' Does this apply only to other Girl
Scouts? What would you do to make sure that you are being a sister to
everyone on the playground?" "Draw a picture of your friends. Name one
person not in your picture that you will try to include during recess
or free time."

The exercise is self-administered, Piwowarczyk says. "We want members
to reflect on the issues and answer questions for themselves."

But tying social conduct to quantitative rewards like patches raises
the question of how a leader knows if someone "gets it," or is simply
parroting back "correct" responses. Unlike other patch-worthy
achievements, like building a Web page, mastering the "Why Tease?"
message is hard to measure. How a girl responds in real life, experts
say, when they're surrounded by friends and classmates, not teachers
and Scout leaders, is the only test of a program's success.

"This can't be about getting a patch. It needs to be about learning
behaviors," says Rosalind Wiseman. She generally applauds the Girl
Scouts' efforts, but warns against the temptation to rely on
formulaic, one-size-fits-all "solutions."

Of course, whether from personal experience or watching Lindsay
Lohan's hapless outsider in the film "Mean Girls" suffer humiliation
at the hands of the "Plastics," or cringing as the high school in
"Heathers" descends into anarchy, any girl knows that changing
behaviors isn't easy when you believe your very existence depends on
acting a certain way.

In reporting this story, I asked a wide variety of girls about teasing
and being mean. As I listened to their stories, which ranged from
horrific to merely annoying experiences, a common thread emerged: It's
rare for any girl to spend her entire school career as prey or
predator. Kids grow up, allegiances shift, and this year's Mean Girl
is a hair's breadth away from becoming the next victim, cowed by the
vicious pronouncements of the latest ruler of the Girl Realm.

Dianna Daniel, a soft-faced 19-year-old who spent 12 years in the Girl
Scouts, is now a junior leader for a troop of 8-to-11-year-olds.
Articulate and soft-spoken, the North Side native will begin her
second year at Truman College this fall. She wears her brown hair
pulled into a ponytail and her left ear is lined with jewelry; a
tongue stud flashes as she speaks.

"I think the teasing starts in 3rd grade," she says. "I was guilty of
bullying when I was in the 3rd grade because I looked up to my older
sister, and she knew what was cool and what wasn't. So I figured I
knew everything." And she let everyone know it.

By the time Daniel got to Lake View High School, the tables had
turned. "I was a special-education student, so I got a lot of teasing
and bullying because of that," she says. "I never felt safe, no matter
how much security was there. I'm 18, I'm in college, and I still deal
with people making comments and bullying." Her new defense is silence:
Just ignore it, because letting it get to you is what the bullies
want.

As a junior leader, Daniel does her best to pass along her hard-earned
wisdom to the girls in her troop. She says she's astonished by how
mean the teasing can be, even among girls as young as 8. "I don't
remember there being as much teasing when I was that age," Daniel
says. "Even during our meetings, some girls will tease each other, and
you have to pull them aside and tell them, 'You can't do that. This is
supposed to be a safe place.' "

What do the girls tease each other about? Everything and nothing,
Daniel says. Everything from wardrobe choices to crayon technique is
fair game. Some of it is just kids jostling for attention, she says,
but some of it is "definitely meant to be mean," and some of the
interactions are tinged with something more menacing than spite.
"They're a lot more aggressive." Daniel says. "I remember when I was
in school, someone would make fun of me in a normal-sounding voice.
But now you can tell there's a lot of anger there." Daniel pauses, and
shakes her head. "It's scary to me."

Daniel and others interviewed declined to elaborate on the taunts and
threats they'd received or overhead. But a quick troll through several
Web logs reveals a fairly universal Mean Girl language, which
occasionally flirts with real viciousness or threats of violence, but
usually sticks close to a prearranged script. From the message boards
of YM magazine: "like i'll just be minding my own business and her and
her stupid friends come up right beside me and be like omg, shes so
ugly. omg, look at her clothes. omg, this. omg that. i kinda want to
punch them in their faces. cause no one looks perfect every freaking
day. its been going on for like 2 years now."

Thirteen-year-old Kelly Sineni could be a poster child for well-
adjusted adolescence. A Girl Scout and 8th grader at Smyser School on
the Northwest Side, Sineni represents a tiny sub-category of middle-
school girls. Although acutely aware of Mean Girls and their methods,
she seems to be remarkably unaffected by them.

"It all started in the 5th grade," she says. "Girls started saying
mean things about each other, starting rumors talking about what
people were wearing." While boys' fights quickly turn physical, "Girls
seem to hold grudges and want to get revenge." Asked if she ever
confronted bullying, Sineni pauses to think. "I used to go to day
camp," she recalls. "One girl would say these really mean things to
another girl, who was quiet. I just told her to stop picking on her. I
stood up." Was she scared? "No, not really," says Sineni. "I knew the
[mean] girl."

She also knew how to express herself without escalating the situation,
a skill she says she learned from the Girl Scouts. "I'll always go to
my Girl Scout leaders," when overwhelmed by an interpersonal problem,
Sineni says. "They help us resolve things. Or I'd talk to my best
friends, and they're all in Girl Scouts."

Demographically, the Girl Scouts organization is undergoing seismic
shifts, creating a new audience for its programs and extending the
organization's reach well beyond its roots in white, middle-class
suburbia. The Chicago Scouts, for example, are an impressively diverse
group. According to 2005 figures, membership is 38 percent white, 38
percent black and 1 percent Asian. At least 20 percent of members did
not report their race.

Within those numbers, another trend is emerging. Latina membership in
the Girl Scouts surged 22 percent between 2003 and 2006. It's not
surprising, then, that the Chicago Girl Scouts would find a warm
welcome at Eli Whitney Elementary School. The Scouts have worked with
the school, in the Little Village neighborhood, for 17 years.
Whitney's student population is 99 percent Hispanic, and some of the
youngest kids don't speak much English.

Four evenings a week, as many as 100 girls, ages 5 to 13, come to the
school for lectures, activities and games. These meetings, like those
in 23 other Chicago Public Schools, represent a partnership between
local community groups and the Girl Scouts, which brings after-school
programs, including Scouting, to some 900 girls in Chicago's low-
income, under-served communities. Simone Alexander, a coordinator for
the Little Village Community Development Corporation, oversees the
scouting activities at Whitney. The impact of the program on bullying
and teasing is hard to measure, she says, but she has seen progress at
the grade-school level. "I'd say the program functions best for the
younger girls, those in 1st to 5th grades. By the time girls are in
6th grade, they relate differently to each other."

The 100-year-old school building, which anchors a neighborhood dotted
with bodegas and streets lined with neat, single-family homes, is
clearly showing its age. The cheerful decorations and bright murals
can't quite dispel the dreariness of the Whitney basement, the
fluorescent lights and the dampness hovering over the carefully
aligned lunch tables where 50 girls are seated, talking and giggling.

Some of the younger kids are drawing, carefully plucking crayons from
a pile in the middle of their table. This is the Girl Scout troop for
some 100 girls, all students at Eli Whitney, many of them referred to
the program by their principal, Dr. Miguel Velazquez. Renee Knight,
45, has been working with the Scouts for three years and has seen
every variety of bullying, teasing and name-calling.

"It starts young," she says, shaking her head. "One girl said
something mean to another girl, who started crying. They were in
kindergarten." Among the youngest girls, Knight says, the bullying is
completely arbitrary ("She's my friend, not yours"; "You can't use
that color, because that's my color."). It's an accurate predictor of
the capricious, unpredictable rules of social survival that govern the
middle-school years. ("You can only wear jeans on Monday"; "Ponytails
are only for Thursdays.")

As Knight hurries off to secure the peace and the evening's activities
continue, a few girls approach me. Some, like 12-year-old Yesenia
Savanas and Stephanie Moncayo, 13, both 7th-graders at Eli Whitney,
are eager to chat.

I ask them if they see bullying at their school. They both nod.
"There's punching, and name-calling," Yesenia says. "The girls call
each other bad names and talk about each other." What about the boys?
"Boys hit each other, because they think it's an easier way to solve a
problem," says Stephanie.

The girls took part in the Take Charge! program run by the Girl Scouts
of Chicago and the Chicago Bar Association. Designed to promote non-
violent conflict resolution, the joint venture targeted girls in
middle and high schools on the city's Near West Side, Garfield Park,
Lawndale and Lower West Side. Stephanie said it provided a forum for a
difficult subject. "Sometimes it's hard to talk to friends about
[bullying and teasing] because they don't understand."

Nine-year-old Ashley Chavez, a quiet girl who smiles from under a
thick veil of dark hair, says that "when girls get mad they use bad
words. And sometimes they will sit at a different lunch table even
though they were best friends." Has she ever been bullied? She nods.

"When I was in preschool," she begins in her soft voice, "there was a
girl who was taller than me, and she told me I was too little to hang
out with her." Ashley stops, looking up at me to make sure I'm
listening. "So I told her that everyone is small sometimes, and who
cares if people are big or small, they're still our friends."

Along with other 8-to-12-year-old girls, Ashley took part in the Girl
Scouts' "Uniquely Me" program, which tries to promotes self-esteem.
The theory is that high self-esteem is a useful tool in counteracting
bullying behavior and makes girls less likely to be bullies
themselves.

Self-esteem is a kind of Holy Grail of Scouting and similar
organizations. Which is great, up to a point, says Rosalind Wiseman,
the author. "We all want strong daughters," she affirms, "but there
are a lot of mean, mean girls who have incredibly high self-esteem. I
tell girls I talk to that I don't care if they're friends with each
other, but they have a responsibility to treat each other with
dignity."

At Whitney and other schools nationwide, a now-familiar threat to
civility has emerged: Cell phones, ubiquitous and, increasingly,
infinitesimal, can be smuggled into just about any classroom or
meeting. Set on silent mode, they're nearly impossible to ferret out.
That's also bad news for teachers, who can hardly expect their lesson

plans to compete with riveting text-message discussions of Amanda's
new hair color, or how hot Ben is or how, like, heinous Sara's skirt
looks.

It's also bad news for girls, according to one recent study by the
University of California-Davis, which found female bullies were
increasingly using text messaging--more than the Internet or physical
confrontations--to torment their victims.

And then there's the siren song of the incoming call. "Talking on the
phone has become a real issue," Renee Knight says. "In the middle of
class or a meeting, a phone will vibrate. They'll always say they
'have to' answer it but I tell them, if it's between 6 and 8 p.m.
[meeting time] and it's not an emergency, they don't answer it."

Meanwhile, text-messaging has eliminated any need to answer the phone,
she notes wryly. "They text the boys during the meetings," Knight
shakes her head. "Just letting them know who's here and who's not."

Cyber-bullying has expanded the reach of Mean Girls exponentially,
agrees Courtney Shore. "Even if phones are off while they're in a
classroom, they can still be used as cameras," she says. "And it's
become the norm among kids to put up fake MySpace pages to make fun of
other kids.

"Odd Girl Out" author Rachel Simmons is the director of The Girls'
Leadership Institute and the Empower Program, which runs workshops for
girls and their mothers. Their motto: "Violence shouldn't be a rite of
passage."

Simmons' expertise on the topic isn't entirely academic. When she was
8, her friends started telling lies about her and ran away from her,
and she had no one to sit with at lunch.

Later, she stood on the other side of the bullying fence. "At 14, I
was a total wannabe," she recalls. "I was popular but always on the
margins. I hurt a friend of mine," in cahoots with another girl, "by
ending our friendship. This caused her so much pain that she left the
school."

She notes that before the wired age, a student could write something
on the bathroom wall and perhaps 10 people would see it before it got
washed off. "Today," she says, "you can spread a rumor or a picture
with the press of a button. Delete buttons and cache-clearing erase
all signs of a bully's handiwork after the damage is done."

"It's this invisible force," says Courtney Shore. "Kids don't know who
or what to fight back against."

The Internet also has introduced a lack of impulse control when it
comes to bullying, says Simmons. "You can't see anyone's face as
you're typing. So you have this immediate gratification of satisfying
your instincts" without having to deal with the real-time

consequences.

Rosalind Wiseman believes that cyber-bullying is sometimes exacerbated
by parents' good intentions. "Parents are giving their children cell
phones because they want them to be safe. They think the world is this
really scary place." But rather than keep girls safe, she says, the
phones provide "a way for girls to destroy or be destroyed. Girls take
pictures of a girl they hate in the locker room after gym class, and
text them to all her friends with these really vicious messages, like
'You're a big fat skank and everyone hates you.' "

But in some cases, blogs and online message boards are used to
challenge the supremacy of Mean Girls. Message boards at
call4ally.com, a blog staffed by a girl named Ally and her mother, a
former marketing executive, included this post from LuckyCharm: "I was
thinking . . . who put mean girls in charge? I'm so tierd [sic] of
them getting what they want! Why do we let them rule? How can we stop
them? What if nice girls ruled vs. mean girls? How can we make that
happen? Am I dreaming? Got any ideas on how to stop mean girls?"

A response from TexasIdeas: "Sure. Surefire solutions? Not so much."

Everyone, including the Girl Scout leadership, agrees that solutions
are not in the cards right now. There are too many variables at play--
including race, class, age, geography--in the Mean Girl epidemic for
there to be a single cure.

But there are innovative, independent programs springing up all over
the country, including "Chicks and Cliques," in the D.C. suburb of
Park Lawn, and Simmons' Empower Program. And that's as it should be,
according to Scouts leader Sho "We're studying this issue as we go.
We're not saying we have the answers."

She'll get no argument from author and educator Wiseman, who views the
Scouts' programs favorably but offers a few caveats. First, she says,
it's important for the Scouts to be aware that their own leaders are
susceptible to this Mean Girl behavior.

"The dynamic of the Girl Scouts makes this a particular issue. Some
troops have co-leaders, which can lead to difficult power struggles,
and then there are mothers who lead troops that include their
daughters." That's a situation, she contends, that can lead to
preferential treatment--"Queen Bee" Moms enabling their "Queen Bee"
daughters--or sweeping problems under the rug.

Parents in general, she notes, want to believe that "[They] have these
perfect children who are so nice and want to be friends" with
everyone, and most parents will defend their children against every
accusation, no matter what evidence they're presented with.

"Just as it's 100 percent predictable that parents will disbelieve
other adults who talk about their kids, it's 100 percent predictable
that parents will believe their children more than any claim against
them."

The lesson for parents, she says, is that they have to be good models.
"Otherwise, girls are going to say, 'Yeah, yeah, we're supposed to be
nice to each other, but look at the way the adults are acting.' The
same goes for teachers in schools." And, of course, troop leaders.

To those Girl Scout leaders, Wiseman offers this advice: Stay engaged
in the day-to-day challenges, however harsh, in girls' lives. "I've
worked with the Girl Scouts," she says. "I'm very challenging with
them about creating substantive programs."

She worries that, despite the talk of age-appropriateness and
relevancy, the Scouts, like any other large organization, run the risk
of implementing programs that are too broad or not geared specifically
enough to the realities of members' lives.

Meanwhile, I've resigned myself to the fact that Mean Girls will never
disappear completely. Social Darwinism, which is simply a fancy term
for people walking all over each other, may be, for better or worse,
intrinsic to the human condition.

But that's not to say I don't think things can't get better. If the
Girl Scouts, or any other organization brave enough to take on the
problem, can keep one girl from teasing, taunting or picking on
another, they'll have my deepest admiration.

As well as the gratitude of millions of little girls who are just now
testing the social waters of elementary school, blithely unaware of
the piranhas lurking just below the surface.


  #3  
Old August 10th 07, 01:46 PM posted to rec.scouting.guide+girl,alt.feminism,soc.women,misc.kids,alt.parenting.solutions
Beliavsky
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 453
Default Tough Cookies: Girl Scouts launch a nationwide offensive against a spreading bully culture among young girls

On Aug 10, 5:21 am, wrote:
So the Girl Scouts is going to attack the bigoted Boy Scouts?


I will join my sons in scouting if they are interested, and I don't
want their scoutmasters to be homosexuals. Most homosexual men do not
molest boys, but I'd bet a higher proportion of homosexual than
heterosexual men do so. Do you think male scoutmasters should lead
Girl Scouts on camping trips? Another point is that scoutmasters are
supposed to be role models, and I don't want homosexual role models
for my sons. Homosexual activists are quick to denounce people who
oppose their agenda, but parents should not be cowed.

  #4  
Old August 10th 07, 02:59 PM posted to rec.scouting.guide+girl,alt.feminism,soc.women,misc.kids,alt.parenting.solutions
R. Steve Walz
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 2,954
Default Tough Cookies: Girl Scouts launch a nationwide offensive against a spreading bully culture among young girls

Beliavsky wrote:

On Aug 10, 5:21 am, wrote:
So the Girl Scouts is going to attack the bigoted Boy Scouts?


I will join my sons in scouting if they are interested, and I don't
want their scoutmasters to be homosexuals.

-----------------------
Definitely avoid the Boy Scouts, the boys who join must all be
faggots, why else would they want to sleep with other boys??
Steve
  #5  
Old August 10th 07, 05:21 PM posted to rec.scouting.guide+girl,alt.feminism,soc.women,misc.kids,alt.parenting.solutions
Jude Alexander[_2_]
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 2
Default Tough Cookies: Girl Scouts launch a nationwide offensive against a spreading bully culture among young girls


"Beliavsky" wrote in message
ups.com...
On Aug 10, 5:21 am, wrote:
So the Girl Scouts is going to attack the bigoted Boy Scouts?


I will join my sons in scouting if they are interested, and I don't
want their scoutmasters to be homosexuals. Most homosexual men do not
molest boys, but I'd bet a higher proportion of homosexual than
heterosexual men do so. Do you think male scoutmasters should lead
Girl Scouts on camping trips? Another point is that scoutmasters are
supposed to be role models, and I don't want homosexual role models
for my sons. Homosexual activists are quick to denounce people who
oppose their agenda, but parents should not be cowed.


Everything negative you said about homosexuals is true for us heterosexuals.
Most heterosexual men don't molest girls but I'd bet a higher proportion of
heterosexuals than homosexual men do? See how funny that sounds? LOL
"Heterosexual (or anti-homosexual to be more exact) activists" are quick to
denounce people who oppose their agenda, right?

The Boy Scouts COULD be seen as bigoted. Why are girls excluded? Don't
girls deserve a club promoting the same values, i.e. honesty, integrity,
helpfulness to others, etc. etc.? The girl scouts are not the same.
Probably the Brownies were closer to the boys scouts than the girl scouts.
Are boy scouts encouraged to sell products?


 




Thread Tools
Display Modes

Posting Rules
You may not post new threads
You may not post replies
You may not post attachments
You may not edit your posts

vB code is On
Smilies are On
[IMG] code is On
HTML code is Off
Forum Jump

Similar Threads
Thread Thread Starter Forum Replies Last Post
Tough Cookies: Girl Scouts launch a nationwide offensive against a spreading bully culture among young girls Fred Goodwin, CMA General 4 August 10th 07 05:21 PM
Official Burt Young Website Launch! [email protected] General 0 March 7th 07 07:54 AM
Violence and spanking from culture to culture transference .. especiallyfor the LIAR DOAN. 0:-> Spanking 17 April 26th 06 05:43 AM
Fast-shrinking teen queens influence young girls Ablang General 0 October 8th 05 06:32 AM
What a young girls backside is for Steven Spanking 0 March 27th 04 07:23 PM


All times are GMT +1. The time now is 07:22 PM.


Powered by vBulletin® Version 3.6.4
Copyright ©2000 - 2024, Jelsoft Enterprises Ltd.
Copyright ©2004-2024 ParentingBanter.com.
The comments are property of their posters.