Girls
are now bigger bullies than boys
http://education.guardian.co.uk/classroomviolence/story/0,12388,837731,00.html
Guardian
- 10th November 2002
Charity
says increase in 'girl-to-girl' cruelty blights lives and is in
danger of escalating out of control
Bullying
is now far more prevalent among girls than boys and is blighting
the future of a generation of young women.
A leading
charity has uncovered a huge rise in 'girl-to-girl cruelty', leading
to unprecedentedly high numbers leaving school with little or no
qualifications and going on to lead disaffected lives.
The Young
Woman's Christian Association (YWCA), whose patron is the Queen,
is now to put pressure on the Government to set up a working party
to look at ways of tackling the effect of schoolgirl bullying.
In a briefing
report entitled 'If Looks Could Kill: Young Women and Bullying',
the welfare charity for women says it believes bullying is a major
underlying issue in girls' truanting and taking time off sick from
school. It points to a study that found half of a random selection
of 3,000 schoolgirls experienced bullying and said the problem was
in danger of escalating out of control.
Mananda
Hendessi, head of policy and campaigns at the YWCA, said bullies
themselves were also at risk of going on to lead damaged lives,
of becoming involved in girl gangs, criminality, and drug and alcohol
abuse.
'Girls are
now more involved in sustained bullying than boys and they have
more fear of going to school,' she said.
'We have
been finding that girls who are self-excluding from school or even
taking a lot of time off sick have actually been bullied. We find
these young women leaving school with no qualifications and going
on to become teenage pregnancy statistics or worse. It is especially
a grave issue among ethnic minorities where racist bullying goes
undetected. These girls leave school with their self-esteem and
confidence crushed.'
Hendessi
said moves to tackle bullying and truancy were failing females.
'This is a huge problem that's going unnoticed. Young men dominate
the agenda on truancy, exclusions and because they present aggressive
and more obvious antisocial behaviours. The girls are suffering
in far more silence and the bullying they experience is more emotionally
damaging.'
For Fatima
Kelly, a mixed race teenager from the West Midlands, bullying, name
calling and a campaign of nasty text messaging led to her being
so scared to go to school that she faked bulimia, even to her doctor,
in order to be allowed to stay at home.
Now 19,
and five months pregnant, she still cannot talk about her schooldays
without weeping. 'My mum would have been so upset if I'd told her
what was going on so I didn't tell anyone. I just pretended to be
ill. I threw my mobile away once but my mum bought me a new one
and gets upset if I don't have it with me.
'The girls
at school made my life there hell. They still do really because
I still see some of them around town, I'm always looking out for
them whenever I go out; it makes me feel sick in busy places in
case I bump into one of them.
'I wanted
to be a dentist, but I was never at school in the last two years.
They never let up, never. One of my counsellors told me it was tragic
that I was not at university but going to be a single mother. I
suppose it is sad and I know it hurts my mother.'
Hendessi
believes Fatima's story is more common than is realised and a report
from the Schools Health Education Unit has stated 'it is girls who
report more fear of attending school because of bullying'.
Despite
initial research in the Nineties suggesting boys were responsible
for a large part of the bullying girls were subjected to, the YWCA
paper will add to the growing evidence that girl-to-girl cruelty
is the norm.
