At home in a culture obsessed with romantic love, where talk shows feature women sparring in you-took-my-man catfights, the girls knew instantly that kissing Luke was a valid cause for anger. This was not like the awkward feelings of jealousy for not being popular or not having the guy you want like you; it was not the discomfort of secret competition over grades or the sadness of having been abandoned by a friend. This was clearly wrong, a misstep no one could deny.
The trouble was, once the girls got going, their anger got out of control. Every past grievance shot to the surface and crashed down on Erin. Because the girls had sequestered their feelings, hurt and jealousy were transformed into a dangerous well of rage. Michelle celebrated that no one would have to be afraid of Erin any longer. She might have added that no one would have to be afraid of conflict and anger, either.
Yet at the peak of their fury, what these girls wanted was nothing more than to isolate Erin. They didn't want to strike her, spread rumors about her, or confront her. They wanted her alone. When Erin tried to hang out with less popular girls, her friends were even angrier. "She was getting friends," Michelle said. "We wanted her to see what it was like to not have anybody there."
Michelle's willingness to speak with me about her feelings toward Erin was extraordinary. She is an example to all of us who struggle to express our own anger. Yet she's very much an ordinary girl: funloving, sensitive, kind, and smart. She is the very opposite of cruel. What she struggled with was how to negotiate her anger and still maximize her intimacy with the friend she loved most. The same can be said of Erin. She is hardly the "bitch" her friends made her out to be. She is instead a girl who got lost in the demands of her own popularity and ended up making mistakes. Like Michelle, Erin is a lovely young woman, sparkling with laughter, wit, and a generous spirit that pulls everyone to her like a magnet.
The salience of relationship in girls' lives makes their practice of imposing isolation worthy of our attention. As we have seen, girls experience isolation as especially terrifying. Since girls earn social capital by their relationships with others, isolation cuts to the core of their identities. For most girls there is little more painful than to stand alone at recess or lunch.
Erin's fear of her new friends' anger is echoed in different degrees by many survivors of bullying. These girls described feeling unfamiliar with the most basic rules of relationship, things taken for granted by any socially adjusted person. They no longer feel certain of what makes people angry or upset, not to mention how to tell when someone is feeling that way. Their emotional radar is incapacitated. This can turn a girl into a cautious ghost of her former self, stifled and silenced by fear.
The fear is felt by degrees among girls who struggle with everyday conflict. One of the chief symptoms of girls' loss of self-esteem is the sense of being crazy, of not being able to trust one's own interpretation of people's actions or events. Did she just look at her when I said that? Was she joking? Did she roll her eyes? Not save the seat on purpose? Lie about her plans? Tell me that she'd invited me when she hadn't? The girls I interviewed confirmed a similar unrest, the disturbing belief that what they were sure they knew or saw wasn't that at all, but was in fact something quite different. In discord between girls, gestures of conflict often contradict speech, confounding their intended targets. In such a universe, for a girl to trust her own truths, her own version of events, can be excruciatingly difficult. At the cusp of their most tumultuous years of development, girls cling tightly to one another to know, as one told me, "that we're not crazy." Yet it is their close peer relationships, and the rules against truth telling, that often trigger these feelings.
Chapter Four
bff 2.0: cyberbullying and cyberdrama
Two twelve-year-old girls were sitting cross-legged on the floor of a bedroom, hunched over a stickered laptop. Leah and Ellie were Facebook chatting with Ellie's ex-boyfriend who, moments earlier, had asked if he and Ellie could get back together. His request prompted Ellie to screech.
"Calm down!" Leah said briskly. Ellie froze. Her face grew stony. She stood up and walked a few feet over to her own laptop. The room began clicking with stubborn, angry keyboard strokes.
"ur so obsessed with Lilly! y dont u guys get married? all u do is talk about Lilly, y r u even here?" Ellie typed.
Leah stared at Ellie. "You can't say that to my face? We're five feet apart!"
Ellie typed, "SHUT UP B——CH!!!!"
Leah kept talking. "You're kidding, right? You can't even call me a b——ch to my face?"
When we spoke, Leah recalled the scene and sighed over Ellie's behavior. "She can say anything to me over text and it won't matter. We're five feet apart and she calls me a b——ch on Facebook."
***
It is now impossible to parent, teach, or even talk about girls without considering the roles of technology and social media in their lives. The virtual world has become a place girls go to hang out, no different from a hallway, locker room, or cafeteria. What has changed is the efficiency of aggression: social media is a bathroom wall with a jet engine, giving kids the ability to launch their graffiti into a peer's bedroom or pocket.
Depending on who you ask, anywhere from one fifth to one third of youth aged eleven to eighteen have been targets of cyberbullying, or the "willful and repeated harm inflicted through the use of computers, cell phones and other electronic devices." Ask girls if they have been targets of passing online nastiness, and the number skyrockets.26
Technology makes cruelty chillingly simple. Angry at the friend who ignored you today? Click. Annoyed at the girl who is copying your look? Click. Jealous of the girl who is flirting with the guy you like? Click. There is no eye contact, no tone of voice, no immediate consequence. Social media offers a limitless arsenal of weapons: Start a Facebook group to punish the guy-stealing girl. Tag an embarrassing photo of her for everyone to see. Send a vicious text at midnight, then turn your phone off.
"The Internet erases inhibitions," writes New York Times reporter Jan Hoffman, eliciting "psychologically savage" behavior. All this in a world where adults and policy have been slow to catch on, and even slower to act. Parents are alternately intimidated and overwhelmed, while most schools decline to intervene in behavior that occurred "off school grounds."27 Website and software developers are slow to respond to distressed families. Law enforcement mostly clings to the threat of bodily harm as its standard for intervention. Into this vacuum of regulation move the cyberbullies and targets, who operate with few deterrents.
If we can no longer talk about girls without talking about technology, the same is true in reverse: girls' distinctive fears and passions are digitized in BFF 2.0, girls' online social universe. Girls perpetrate and experience cyberbullying in ways that are uniquely Social media lets you type instead of talk, offering girls an oasis from the direct conflict so many of them fear. Armies of girls who avoid face-to-face confrontation can now use their fingers to vent rage, betrayal, or anxiety. "Online," a high school senior told me, "you can say whatever you want to say."
But like a mirage that vanishes upon closer inspection, technology betrays girls. When they turn to social media to resolve their problems, they are more likely to interpret others' messages negatively and act aggressively. These girls, who might otherwise struggle in a direct conversation, become suddenly fierce, cruel "orators" online. Before social media, girls might exchange a phone call or two; now, there are blizzards of nasty texts. "Somebody can't come through the phone and beat you up," a seventh grader told me. "But somebody can beat you up over text all day long." Girls' false confidence and unbridled emotion ignite conflicts for which they are scantly prepared.
Social media plugs right into girls' obsession with relationships—and their fear of losing them: on the one hand, technology allows girls exhilarating, instant access to their peers. Yet social networking sites like Facebook also make friendships tangible and public,28 allowing girls to compare and judge others' relationships: She has 800 Facebook
friends, but I only have 350. She got nine comments replying to her last wall post, but only two people bothered to respond to mine. This is a new kind of "popularity math," a test of likeability where anything you post can be "liked" and rated by your peers.29 Friendships in the online habitat have become yet another item to measure oneself against—like bodies, boyfriends, and grades—and so another painful source of jealousy, insecurity, and anxiety among girls.
Like bullying in real life, cyberbullying does not erupt from thin air. It is often the endgame of a drama that originated in the more mundane interactions that dominate girls' lives. In a recent study, Sameer Hinduja and Justin Patchin, founders of the Cyberbullying Research Center, found that 84 percent of cyberbullying targets reported being bullied by someone they knew, such as a friend, exfriend, former romantic partner, or classmate. Less than 7 percent of youth in this same study reported being cyberbullied by a stranger. (The rest did not know who was bullying them.)30 To really understand girls and cyberbullying, then, we have to examine their day-today online exchanges, where the fuse of cyberbullying gets lit. In this chapter, I journey through the sprawling virtual landscape of BFF 2.0, from its darkest corners to its most traveled byways.
Media and culture would have us believe that children are "digital natives," while their clueless parents and educators are "digital immigrants." This is a dangerous myth.31 The idea that there is nothing at all strange or foreign to children navigating technology suggests adults are the ones who need educating. But social media involves at least two discrete sets of skills: the ability to manipulate the gadgets, and the capacity to interact safely and responsibly. The two are not related, and ease of use does not guarantee a grasp of its consequences.32 Navigating the virtual world requires new skills that must be learned and practiced. Just as girls starting school need tools to resolve the challenges of their "real-life" relationships, girls online require the same.
Unplugging is never the answer, just as staying home from school will not resolve conventional bullying. The phone or computer is not merely a device. It's a window to a world that, for most girls, is as compelling and active as their "real" world.
cyberbullying
My mother picked me up after school on the days Abby made my friends run away from me. When the car door closed, I knew I was safe. Today, the end of school no longer offers relief. Cell phones and social networking sites tether girls to their bullies day and night, making cruelty impossible to escape. As Internet safety expert Parry Aftab has said, cyberbullying follows you everywhere: to grandma's house, to sports practice, to dinner.
The cruelty moves as swiftly as it does widely. Before social media, bullying was slowed by the pace of physical relationship: It took time for girls to catch up and share. There was also less time to talk. Today, texting is social background noise, an accompaniment to nearly every other activity girls do. Researchers report a significant increase in "multitasking," or using more than one form of media at the same time, among teens.33 Information is abbreviated, omitting important subtleties of a situation or feeling. It is also churned out addictively; the average American teen sent three thousand texts every month in 2010, and the most slanderous texts went viral with whiplash speed.34
Girls live in their very own twenty-four-hour news cycle. Where the bell once rang at day's end, giving girls a chance to rest and recharge, texts and chats now fly at all hours, including the middle of the night, when we are all least reasonable. Some girls sleep with cell phones under their pillows or on their chests, so they can feel the vibration and awaken. It is not uncommon for a Facebook status update to read, simply, "text"; meaning, I can't be reached this way, so find me another way. Find me at all times.
Add to this a radical change in privacy in girls' lives. Much of girls' social interactions online are now played out in public. On Facebook, where the age of use continues to shrink, the live news feed format runs a vertical crawl of endless updates: how friends feel from moment to moment, who they interact with and who their newest friends are. At the center of each user's personal page is the Facebook Wall, a kind of bulletin board where friends can "tack" messages to say heyyyyy, happy birthday, what's tonight's homework? Moments better left private—a girl and her friends making plans that may exclude others, a friend who posts inside jokes or leaves cryptic messages that make others insecure—are now broadcast with a few simple clicks.
Imagine being a girl who feels socially insecure and seeing, on your friend's wall, a post that simply says, "OMG" [oh my God]. She may think, What does that mean? Is something happening? Why don't I know about it? Is it about me? Sitting alone in front of a computer, she becomes anxious and assumes the worst. She may begin contacting others for more information, starting a chain of gossip that could set off a conflict about an issue that does not even exist in the first place.
Few girls learn about the insecurity, hurt, or betrayal these public online interactions can inspire, or what might happen if they make assumptions based on what they are reading; instead, girls simply do it, because everyone else is doing it, and because it is an inevitable part of being a twenty-first-century girl. As communication becomes more impulsive, quick, and public, it also becomes coarser. This is not necessarily because girls are trying to be mean, but because turning private interactions public can alter their meaning and impact.
The change in privacy has given rise to new norms among girls, especially when they are angry. Before social media, the most ganging up girls could do after hours was via a three-way phone call. Today, social networking sites allow hundreds of people to watch and throw their two cents into the mix. What an adult grew up thinking belonged in a journal, or vented quietly to a friend, is today easily shared and commented on by multiple peers. Girls who might fear live confrontations in front of peers now unleash online status updates and away messages filled with anger, frustration, and threats: "I wish," wrote a middle-school girl on her public Tumblr, which is a kind of online journal, "everyone knew what a lying piece of s——t you are." Within twenty-four hours, hundreds of peers had either reposted the comment to their own page, or declared their loyalty by "liking" the comment. "[W]ow people should really grow up ... no one likes people that are b——ches, and come up with different lies everyday to make themself [sic] look cool!" posted a high-school girl on Facebook. Into the fray jump peers whose comments ("loveeee u girl" "OMFG" "haha") betray varying agendas: sympathy, loyalty, backup, revenge.
Like summer thunder, online fights can erupt with little warning. A single misinterpreted remark can start a war. After an eighth-grade girl commented, innocently enough, that a photograph of her group's alpha female resembled another girl, friends swarmed the page, attacking her. As the girls barraged her with insults ("how about you go behind doors and CUT yourself" and "wat makes u think we care about ur life"), another crowed, "shutdown," while the target tried to defend herself. Eventually the other girls began declaring their love for each other ("I love you ... you guys are amazing friends ") while the target flailed. As one detective told the New York Times, "It's not the swear words. They all swear. It's how they gang up on one individual at a time. 'Go cut yourself.' Or 'you are sooo ugly'—but with 10 u's, 10 g's, 10 I's, like they're all screaming at someone." The viciousness of the messages is deepened by the public intimacy between the tormentors.
In girls' social universe, information is power. But gossip needs an audience, and getting one isn't easy if you lack status. Online, the social rules change. Technology levels the playing field, allowing girls with less status in real time a chance to make waves online. Should you have trouble getting someone to notice you at school, you are just a few clicks away from the rapt attention of online eyes. Power and status distribute more equally in a world where anyone can write anything that others may believe and act on.
Several studies have found significant gender differences in cyberbullying. Sameer Hinduja and Justin Patchin of the Cyberbullying Research Center found that 26 percent of girls
were targets of cyberbullying, compared to 16 percent of boys. Another study found that girls are nearly twice as likely as boys to have rumors spread about them online. Some 22 percent of girls surveyed by Hinduja and Patchin reported cyberbullying others, compared to 18 percent of boys.35
Both targets and aggressors show significantly lower self-esteem than peers who are not involved in cyberbullying. Those victimized by cyberbullying are more likely to experience anxiety, depression, school violence, academic trouble, suicidal ideation, and suicide attempts.36
The breathtaking cruelty unfolding online cannot be attributed to only its medium, or the lack of oversight surrounding it. The teen brain is still developing, honing its capacity to take healthy risks and consider the consequences of behavior. Coupled with the burning desire to fit in that beleaguers so many girls, we have a dangerous recipe indeed.
In the fall of eighth grade, Kelsey broke up amicably with her boyfriend, Aaron, in a largely white, middle-class, northeastern suburb of about thirty-five thousand people. A few weeks later, she regretted her decision. When her close friend and soccer teammate, Lauren, said she liked Aaron, Kelsey remained quiet.
"At first," Kelsey told me in our phone interview, "I got upset, but then I was, like, she's my friend and I want her to be happy." Kelsey kept mum and resolved to enjoy her friendship with Aaron, who had asked Lauren out.
Within days, Lauren was bristling at Kelsey's friendship with Aaron. She texted Kelsey. "She started to tell me to back off, he doesn't like you, he never did, you're not his type." Kelsey refused to end her friendship with Aaron. Lauren posted similar remarks on Facebook for her hundreds of friends to see and comment on.
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