Schools in the Philadelphia region tackle the issue of bullying head-on:
Penn Central Middle, in Bucks County's Pennridge School District, is one of many schools in the region and nation that have started anti-bullying programs to address the differences in the way boys and girls bully.Schools started taking bullying much more seriously after the 1999 Columbine High School massacre. The more bullying was discussed and researched, the more obvious it became to school officials that girls and boys have different favorite methods.
Boys are more likely to use their fists, while girls use words as weapons. Boys are often trying to prove their dominance over each other - who is the toughest, strongest, the best athlete.Girls are more about relationships - if one is mad at another, she tries to persuade her friends to also be mad.
"If a girl can make it so another girl can sit alone in the cafeteria, then they got her"...
Some of the definitions of "bullying," though, are far too broad:
Girls can hurt others by excluding them, said Daria Mojibian, counselor at Parkview Elementary School in Westville. Last school year, fourth-grade girls made up clubs that had animal mascots, and, even though they were not real clubs, the girls would not allow certain girls to join.A few weeks ago, Mojibian said, a popular sixth grader found a broken pen on the playground and went around putting ink dots on the hands of her friends. "All the popular girls had them, all the popular boys had them," she said. One girl, who is accepted only sometimes by the popular crowd, did not get a dot and became so upset that she smeared the ink on a student's jacket, she said.
I don't know that I'd want my daughter to feel that everyone had to accept her, or want her to join their club, or that it would be acceptable (or productive) for her to smear ink if she didn't get included. If fourth-grade girls want to create unofficial clubs and invite only their friends to join, why shouldn't they be allowed to? While students should learn to treat everyone with respect, I've never been much for the idea that their friendships, clubs, and cliques should be forced to be as all-inclusive as possible.
Posted by kswygert at February 1, 2006 06:18 AM