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Girl Bullying Isn't New, Nor Are Efforts To Combat It

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By BILLY TOWNSEND | The Tampa Tribune

Published: April 25, 2008

LAKELAND Seeking payback over a slight, a group of girls, with the help of two boys, manhandle an acquaintance as part of well-planned confrontation.

They lock her in a room. When she tries to get away, they restrain her and taunt her.

The leader threatens to kill her if she screams.

Sound familiar?

It's how the Polk County Sheriff's Office describes the beating of 16-year-old Victoria Lindsay, recorded on video at a Lakeland home for posting on the Internet.

Take away the cell phones and video cameras, and make the parties a few years younger, however, and you have the climax of "Blubber" – author Judy Blume's 1974 novel about girl bullying in a fictional fifth-grade class.

More than 30 years later, tortured relationships among girls can still fascinate and alarm. This is now Rosalind Wiseman's territory. She wrote a 2002 pop culture take on relationships and bullying, "Queen Bees and Wannabes." It sought to map the landscape of girl culture and group psychology and suggest ways to navigate it more safely.

It became the basis for the hit 2004 movie, "Mean Girls."

Wiseman says the video of the girls attacking and taunting Lindsay affected her deeply. She hopes it might spur some widespread introspection."I would be thrilled if this led adults to ask, 'What's our responsibility for solving this problem?'" she said during an interview Tuesday... "If nothing else, if you're a parent, are you teaching your child not to whip out a cell phone camera when a fight breaks out in a school hallway?"

Yet, Wiseman fears the rapid spread of information and images in the digital age has turned the video beating story into a carnival of self-righteousness and voyeurism that encourages entirely different questions and behaviors.

It also perpetuates an image that is false: Crime rates for girls have dropped each year for the past 13 years, reaching their lowest levels since 1973, according to a 2006 report by the U.S. Department of Justice. Murder by girls is at its lowest level since 1963.

The mass exposure is a concern shared by Mary Baird, president of the Ophelia Project, a national organization that helps schools create safer social cultures. Baird said the repetition of the video "normalizes" what it shows and perpetuates a sense that there is something wrong with today's girls, that they possess an innate "mean gene."

"I think it's more damaging than helpful in all regards," Baird said.

Courage And Social Justice

Wiseman said she followed the Mulberry beating story from the beginning and has little sympathy for the teens arrested.

"I still lose my words about it. Where are the self-brakes on behavior?" she said. "How do you get to a place where you could do that crap?"

At the same time, she aims some of her harshest criticism at the parents and commentators who express moral shock and talk with certainty about how their own children could never be involved in such a thing.

The confrontation with Lindsay happened in the wake of some back and forth online trash talk and texting. Investigators said the girls who taped the attack planned to post it on MySpace and YouTube.

That separates the episode from the bullying of "Blubber," Wiseman said.

At least a child of the "Blubber" era could go home to find some refuge. Today, any girl or boy who uses a home computer or cell phone is never out of reach of the emotional drama of school.

"It's more unrelenting now. Kids can't get away from it," she said.

Wiseman scoffs at parents who boast that they control their kids' computer use.

"Oh, yeah? Let's go look at the computer and see if your daughter doesn't have five different screen names, all of them something like "sexydiva12," she said.

The key is not monitoring the computer or taking away cell phones, though both can help protect children. More important, Wiseman and Baird say, is instilling a sense of personal courage and social justice in children, influencing them not to take pleasure in other people's humiliation.

Blume, who declined to be interviewed for this story, covered the same ground in "Blubber," which grew from a real incident at one of her children's schools.

The victim, dubbed "Blubber" because she's overweight, is tripped, pinched, shoved, and forced to show her underwear to boys. The threat of more violence underlies every torment.

"When I began this book I was determined to write the truth about the school-bus culture in the language of that culture. Blubber is funny to a point, then wham!" writes Blume on her Web site. "Some adults are bothered by the language and the cruelty, but the kids get it. They live it."

The story highlights the cowardice of the children involved, most of whom follow a pair of key leaders out of fear. But it also spotlights the inaction of parents and teachers who either try to laugh off what's happening or pretend they don't notice it.

Baird says studies show only about 15 percent of students are willing to intervene on behalf of a classmate. The Ophelia project aims to nudge that percentage up, often by having older kids work to influence younger ones.

A crucial element of that effort is ensuring that the adult supervision within a school supports and protects kids who step forward.

"Think about it," Baird said. "If you have a neighborhood watch program, would you call the police if you knew you were going to be attacked?"

Massive Attention, Diminished Girls

The barrage of punching and slapping that Lindsay endured was brutal. But there are worse acts of violence each week in Polk County and across the country. None of the girls used a weapon. Police reports say they apparently stopped the attack on their own.

The Polk County State Attorney's Office charged the teens with misdemeanor battery in the beating. State Attorney's Office spokesman Chip Thullbery would not comment on that decision.

It's not the beating that has the teens facing a possible life sentence. It's kidnapping, the refusal to let Lindsay leave the house during the 30-minute ordeal. In the real world, the kids in "Blubber" could have been charged with precisely the same offense.

So why did news of the video spreads farther than the killing of Armando Cortez, 16, shot and killed outside a birthday party at Bartow's Carver Recreational Facility on Dec. 23? Or of 13-year-old Kristian Marrero-Cassola, killed in an after-school knife fight Dec. 7.

Dr. Phil, Greta Van Susteren or the "Today" show didn't call Polk Sheriff Grady Judd to talk about these cases.

One obvious answer, Wiseman said, is the video – and that people like to watch girls fight.

"It's why we like in the worst of our culture to show catfights," Wiseman said. "It's a way of diminishing girls, diminishing girls' anger and diminishing girls' emotions."

At the same time, Wiseman said she suspects that perceptions of class, race and sex are at work.

"It's a bunch of white girls in suburban Florida," Wiseman said, adding in mock horror: "Oh, look at the state of our country."

Contradictions

Whatever is behind the popularity of the video beating, irony is at its heart.

Much of the outrage driving the story arises from the girls' plan to post the video on the Internet. The video was seized before they could, but media organizations clamored for it, the sheriff's office was quick to release an excerpt, and the public flocked to view it.

In a sense, Wiseman and Baird agreed, it was a collective act of holding the cell camera up to a fight.

Both women emphasize how hard it is to overcome the human weaknesses that have always been at work in bullying and youth drama.

That climactic scene in "Blubber" ends when the narrator of the book finally stands up to the leader. What happens next? The narrator becomes the focus of the group's cruelty, and Blubber herself is only too happy to join in with them.

Wiseman points to her own experience with "Mean Girls," where many of the movie's funniest moments emerge from depictions of the very acts of cruelty she would like to stop.

In "Queen Bees and Wannabes," Wiseman wrote that Halloween has become a license for some girls to behave and dress in aggressive ways.

After "Mean Girls" came out, Wiseman said she heard many girls dressed up for Halloween as "The Plastics," the clique of vicious, Queen Bee girls portrayed in the movie. They did so "without irony," she said.

"Girls always subvert my message," Wiseman said.

Baird describes her organization's work as hard and often discouraging. Building a more just culture and continuity between students and adults takes time and effort. The results are never perfect, she said.

But the effort endures, largely unreported, she said.

"Because it's not sexy."

Reporter Billy Townsend can be reached at (863) 284-1409 or wtownsend@tampatrib.com.

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