Girl Bullying, what's with all the ANGER?

GIRLFRIENDS, October 2007, by Jenifer Merifield

Girl Bullying
What’s with all the anger?



What do you want, girls?
Fundamentally speaking... I’m not talking shoes, the latest fashions, a new i-Pod or some other trendy possession. I’m talking on the inside. What do you want so that you feel at the very least ‘content’ about yourself, if not ‘on top of the world’?

Remember this next fact while you read the rest of this article:
All girls, on the inside, want the SAME THINGS as each other. Want to know what they are? Read on and we’ll get to that a bit later...

The letters that come in from our web site for the Girlfriends section are 90% about conflict, negative relationships and bullying... between girls who are most often friends, or were so at one point. Here are some tidbits: “please help me, my ex-BFF and her new BFF are spreading rumours about me”, “I just want to be skinny so they leave me alone”, “they spit on me on the bus... I was so scared”, “she said on MSN that her and some other girls would beat the...”, “I’m so mad”, “I wish we could move”, “I hate them”... and those are among the most extreme.

So why is it that teenage girls can be so competitive, jealous and abusive to each other? Are there some people who just deserve to be picked on? Should the mean girls get a dose of ‘meanness’ to see how it feels?

No matter how mad or frustrated we get, no one ever deserves to be bullied. And all that steam... it’s anger we feel as a direct result of fear. When someone is afraid of something, anger is one way to try and overcome that fear. It makes us feel more powerful, less of a victim.

Where does the anger come from?
I’d say we learn it from our surroundings. Be that of other angry people at home, on TV or at school. We learn by example. If we grow up seeing examples of anger being expressed through abusive language, blaming others, yelling and screaming, or being physically abusive, chances are those are some of the ways we may experiment in dealing with our own anger.

That’s not an excuse though. We always have a choice.

What then, are teenage girls so afraid of?
Remember ‘all girls want the same things’? Well, the fear is from worrying we may not have those things. A sense of worth, acceptance by others, feeling like we fit in, being noticed in a positive way by peers, feeling like we are contributing and being appreciated for it. We all want those things.

Very common is the situation where a girl gets picked on by one of the others in a group of friends. The others in the group have to make a decision: “do I go along with it knowing it’s wrong, or do I stick up for my friend with the chance I could be next!” Have you been in a similar situation? It’s astounding how many girls will turn on their friends out of fear of being picked on themselves.

Try to imagine your Mom, teacher or another grown up that you really admire, as your age in a group of friends, being picked on and bullied. Imagine her running home crying and feeling scared and hurt. How does that make you feel? Do you want to stick up for her? Now what if you imagined the same person being the Bullier? Being so mean to another girl that it makes her go home and cry. Hard to imagine isn’t it?

Think about this then... if you want to grow up to be admired and respected as much as you admire and respect your Mom/teachers/coaches and so on, then what kind of person do you need to be right now? What do you need to do to set yourself on the path to be the kind of person another teenager in ten or more years from now will look up to?

Girls definitely don’t have it easy these days;!
What with the bazillions of media messages, be-better advertising, real life TV about competing for a guy, and the Britneys and Lindsays of the world who are honestly just scared girls trying desperately to ‘fit in’, ‘be accepted’ and ‘contribute positively’. Unfortunately, their less than desirable life choices are working against them as they are plastered all over newsstands for us to see. But remember, we are choosing to read it, watch it, listen to it, and entertain it. If we didn’t, it wouldn’t exist.

I’m not going to tell you to “be nice” or “don’t judge”...you already know that. What I will say though is that whether you feel like the victim, the bully or somewhere in between, you ARE worthy. The choices you make today are creating the woman you will be in the future.

~Jenifer


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