Girls talk
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 11: Getting Smart
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Meera Atkinson
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Meera Atkinson's biography and other articles by this writer
Girls Talk is a classic Dave Edmunds song, penned by Elvis Costello, and it captures in a few verses and choruses the complexities of a girl culture that thrives in the corridors and toilets of schools around the world. Movies like Heathers and Mean Girls helped bring the dark side of this secret society to mainstream attention and revealed it as a breeding ground for a stealthy kind of bullying that has long evaded notice and official consequence.
Few children schooled in the Western world escape experiencing or witnessing bullying, but what exactly is it? When we think of bullying we think of the traditional scenario: a bigger boy beating up a smaller boy or the infliction of a humiliating initiation rite on a terrified newcomer. We think of boys and we think of the body, or of persistent schoolyard name-calling. We know girls can bully, and most of us recall the "tough girls" of our childhood, but they were a rarity, seen as an aberration of girlhood.
Dr Ken Rigby from the University of South Australia defines bullying as repeated aggression in which there is an imbalance of power, but aggression itself isn't always easy to recognise. Unlike boy-bullying, which tends to be physical or verbal and overt, girl-bullying can be diabolical, two-faced and strangely intimate.
My childhood best friend, Donna Rowlands, and I went to North Annandale primary school. Last year, I received an email from an old school friend of ours, whom I'll refer to as Tom C. Tom had come across some writing of mine and managed to track me down. I had no recollection of him so I asked if he had been among the boys I'd claimed as a boyfriend. He wrote back saying that yes, Donna and I had once given him a heart-shaped cushion with "We Love You Tom" sewn on it, along with some gushing notes. He admitted that the lingering sentiment of first love was the reason he'd decided to get in touch.
I was seized by concern that the gift he had taken as vital praise might have been one of our tricks and, racked with guilt, I phoned Donna. She reassured me that Tom C had not been the butt of a joke – we really did like him. We liked him so much we trapped him in my bedroom and forced him to kiss us, attacking him with hairspray and lipstick at any sign of resistance. I mentioned this to him in an email and offered to pay his therapy bills, but moments after I sent the message Donna phoned to say that it hadn't been Tom after all, but another boy we regularly victimised, who hangs on the blurry edges of my memory. According to Pru Goward, Sex Discrimination Commissioner, the kissing/hairspray incident probably qualifies as sexual harassment, which she considers a "subset of bullying".
Children are, essentially, conformists. A sense of belonging is the appeal of the best friend or clique; they affirm and enhance the self. Belonging to an "us-world" grants its inhabitants a larger than life-ness. The faith in the other members of the "us" and their faith in you, the movement of this faith flowing back and forth in an open channel, somehow feeds the self, makes it bigger than it was, gives one a boldness unachievable alone.
For the most part, the "us-world" Donna and I created was harmless fun, but bullying and rejection is the shadow life of this desperation to belong, for the nature of belonging to one friendship, group, school, area or subculture necessitates rejection: some will not be allowed to belong. This is natural and not, the experts assure us, cause for alarm. So, when does this normal social order become bullying, and what triggers it?
ONE DAY, A BOY CALLED SPIRO, WHO LIVED AT THE END of our street, threw a birthday party to which Donna and I were not invited. We scooped a dried-out dog turd off the footpath and wrapped it up in endless sheets of newspaper, finally covering it with pretty giftwrap. We presented the gift to Spiro at his front door, party balloons billowing up behind him, with our smiling wishes for a happy birthday.
Another time, we turned on a girl who lived a few doors down. My mother had some innocuous pills that had the baffling side effect of turning her urine blue. Donna and I stole some pills and produced blue piss of our own. We poured it into an empty perfume bottle and gave it to the girl as a present. I have no idea what these children made of our cruelty, but the memories stand as evidence of the unspeakable spite children are capable of in their "us" against "them" narratives.
I was not raised to discriminate against people on the basis of race or colour. Donna was dusky-skinned, of Islander and Chinese heritage. My step-grandfather was Burmese and my family has a United Nations of friends, but there's no denying those unkind gifts expressed a pointed anxiety around difference. Spiro and the girl must have seemed foreign to us, aloof even. It's likely we came to the conclusion they thought they were too good for us.
When I mentioned I was writing about bullying to an Italian-Australian friend over lunch she disclosed that she had been targeted as a "wog" because she dared to be attractive, talented and a top student. She explained, "I wasn't allowed to stand out. As soon as I did a hate campaign started against me. It started with taunts about my loving myself and thinking I was beautiful."
There is another kind of bully victim, who is at the very lowest rung of the social order and who is judged as literally worthless: the un-sporty, the stutterer, the odd child – persecuted not as tall poppies but as weeds. Some children are not just bullied for their difference, but tortured for it.
When we caught up for coffee, Tom C volunteered the haunting story of an event that took place after I'd left North Annandale: a lone Aboriginal girl stands surrounded by a group of children in the playground. One of them starts chanting, "Scaboriginy, scaboriginy ... " Others join in. Before long she is surrounded by what seems like the entire school chanting and clapping. It's an image befitting a horror movie and I can't help wondering where she is now, what her life is like and how she shares her days with this scarring memory.