Phoebe Prince. Image courtesy of The Republican/LandovLast week, when prosecutors announced that nine teenagers-seven of them girls-would be facing felony charges for the "unrelenting" bullying that led to 15-year-old Phoebe Prince's suicide, several sources were quick to follow up with stories of what exactly went wrong at South Hadley High School. The details of these accounts are striking and horrible, the general narrative being "new girl gets too much attention and is punished beyond comprehension." Or as People magazine explains in detail:
"Friends of Prince's say that in late 2009 she briefly dated Sean Mulveyhill, now 17, the captain of the football team who was also dating Kayla Narey, 17, which Phoebe did not know. After this, they say, the bullying by girls jealous of Prince's good looks and popularity with boys intensified."
The legendary meanness of jealous, school-aged girls is regularly immortalized in film-from "Carrie" in 1976, to "Heathers" in 1988, to the aptly titled "Mean Girls" in 2004. In fact, our collective consciousness holds such a long, rich vein of worry for how mean girls can be, that according to a recent article in the New York Times, it has become its own mythology, leading to a damning of innocents.
"Why are we bullying girls?" ask authors Mike Males and Meda-Chesney Lind in the Op-Ed piece, "The Myth of Mean Girls." Noting that the media has really jumped on Prince's case as evidence that girls are getting meaner, they go on to say that "the panic is a hoax," and that the "mythical wave of girls' violence and meanness" is actually just that-a story we've made up that has very little to do with reality.
The amazing facts that follow-that violence among girls has actually dropped in the last decade and in some instances is lower than it has been for four decades, is incredible, heartening news. Backed by statistics from the major indexes of crime (like reports from the FBI, The National Crime Victimization Survey, and The Bureau of Justice Statistics' Intimate Partner Violence) the authors point out that in fact, girls are less violent than ever, and therefore less mean. They also completely miss the point.
Violence in girls is hardly the most important indicator of meanness. The most obvious? Sure. The one that can be most easily documented? Perhaps. The best way to tell if girls are being nasty to each other? Hardly. Anyone who has ever been at the mercy of a group of girls knows that the worst injuries usually come without a single bruise.
"A boy will just come out and beat you up and be done with it, but a girl will whittle you down into nothingness," commented Shine reader Sarah H. on a recent post that asked if girls are meaner than boys. Anecdotal evidence, sure, but the kind that jibes with the early 90s work of a Finnish professor Kaj Bjorkqvist, whose team came to the conclusion that girls are just as aggressive as boys, just not as violent, preferring to "wage complicated battles with other girls aimed at damaging relationships or reputations."
If that sounds a lot more like chess than boxing, consider also that "weapons" have gotten much more sophisticated in the past 40 years. Instead of a nasty note, you get a humiliating email with everyone in the world cc'ed on it. Instead of a prank phone call, you get naked photo of yourself gone viral.
And this is what real meanness from girls looks like-it's not assaults or arrests, but bullying, ostracization, and tiny treacheries that can make school years unbearable. If we are really going to stop believing in "The Myth of Mean Girls," we need to look specifically at those kinds of acts, take the role of technology into account, and compare them to what we've seen in teens over the 70s, 80s and 90s. My guess is that meanness among girls might actually be getting worse, if only because technology makes cruelty easier, more damaging, and more long lasting than ever before.
What do you think? Are girls crueler than they have been in the past, or is that just a hoax perpetuated by the paranoid among us?
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