Welcome to Teachers At Risk
An honour
-
Edublog AwardsFeb
28
Understanding girls bullying girls
Filed Under Bullying, maintaining a safe, positive climate, The way I see it
I believe our task is to give every girl, every parent, and every teacher a shared , public language to address girls’ conflicts and relationships. A world that acknowledges the hidden culture of girls’ aggression would empowers girls not only to negotiate conflict, but to define relationships in new healthier ways. (Rachel Simmins, p.261)
I’ve accepted the challenge of doing what I can using my blog to help give a shared, public language to address the issue of girls bullying girls. Often girls bullying girls isn’t taken seriously at all. There isn’t a good general understanding about the issue of relational aggression, the form of bullying most common with girls.
I came across this video that helps begin to explain the phenomenon of girls bullying girls and want to share it with you. I found it amazing to think that 5% of girls skip school on any given day because they’ve been bullied. Come to think of it though, I’ve had students like that. They were bullied in school and stopped coming to class or even to school to the point where social workers and counseling had to get involved to try to get to the bottom of the issue and give support to the victim as well as the bully. Both the victim and the bully need our support.
If you know of any other resources that would be useful, please leave the link as a comment. We need to get the word out.
Reference
Simmons, Rachel. (2002) Odd Girl Out Orlando:Harcourt,Inc.
.
Related Posts
Enjoyed reading this post? Subscribe to Teachers at Risk.Comments
2 Responses to “Understanding girls bullying girls”
Leave a Reply
Subscribe to stay up to date. Teachers at Risk is informative. It's free.
-
-
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.
Elona,
Always appreciate the resources you share and this one is no exception.
I don’t know how things are in Canada, but I know here in the US many administrators and principals have flat given up on anti-bullying programs because they don’t usually work…certainly not the way we hope.
Here in the US we spend billions of dollars on these workshops, programs, and interventions yet our students still stand a 1-in-4 chance of being the victim of some form of school based violence before they even reach high school. For students ages 12-18, the percentage is a full third that have been bullied or actually report BEING the bully!
I’m working very diligently to raise awareness of this problem — interestingly, one recent article that isn’t getting much attention is the rate of bullying against TEACHERS. For more on that, you can visit http://socialsmarts.wordpress.com/2010/03/31/bullying-not-just-for-kids/ .
Bullying is at epidemic levels and until all sides say “enough!” it’s going to continue, and it’s going to escalate. But most of the time, the excuse is “well, we can’t afford to more about it.” Can’t teach them if they don’t feel safe enough to come to school, right?
- Corinne
Corinne, Thanks for the link. I’m doing a major paper for my MEd on social aggression and will post some of it in my blog. Thanks for the info. I too want to raise awareness of the issue.