CLUB OPHELIA
GIRL BULLYING HAPPENS IN ELEMENTARY SCHOOL ALSO. Please read the story below "Best Friends for Life" from the Club Ophelia Website. http://www.clubophelia.com/
By Ashley, a college freshman
When children are young friends are the cornerstones of their lives. Throughout their education having and making friends is the goal of most students. During the beginning of elementary school popularity is not an issue among young children. While the little kids are sitting in second grade sipping on their chocolate milk, they are more concerned with the two Oreo cookies in front of their classmate than what brand of jeans they are wearing.
When people are young everyone is a friend. They are in a curious state of mind where they need to know everyone and everything. The "social" issues that plague middle school and high school are not relevant in elementary school. Children are friends with anyone willing to share a toy, lend a crayon, or give away half a cookie. Unfortunately, the innocence of childhood quickly diminishes as children prepare to enter middle school.
During the transformation from child to young adult the beliefs and values shared among friends are not as important as the clothes they wear and the people they hang out with. When I was young, I was one of those children who had that same superficiality. Being popular is what, as in most adolescents, was important to me. I struggled to fit in until one day an event happened that changed the whole way I define friends, popularity and what the true values in life really are.
My fifth grade year is when I noticed the cliques developing in my grade. It was never more obvious than at lunch. In my school, where the students sat at lunch determined if they whether they were cool or not. Different groups of people sat different tables respectively. The smart kids sat at one table, the soccer players sat at another, the musicians sat at three tables in the center of the cafeteria, and then there was my table, the popular table.
At lunch I sat with the popular girls: the rich girls, whose parents were doctors and lawyers and lived in mansions on the top of the hill, the rich girls who wore brand name clothes and had different shoes for every day of the week. I sat at their table. I was not rich. My mom was not a doctor or a lawyer. I did not shop at brand name stores. I did not have different shoes for every day of the week, and I definitely did not live in a mansion, but some how I ended up at their lunch table. Some how I became their friend, and I loved it.
I tried my hardest to fit in with the popular crowd. I would go to their sleepovers, make fun of the "band geeks," and claim to shop at all the stores where the cool kids shopped. By the end of the year I spent so much time trying to fit in with the popular crowd, I quickly lost all the friends that I was very close to at the beginning of the year.
Before I knew it sixth grade started. We were now in middle school and being popular was more important than ever. Now it was not only a matter of being popular in my grade, I had to try to fit in with all the older kids my friends already knew. Every day I would act richer and snobbier so they would like me. Every day I lost sight as to who I really was.
During the middle of my sixth grade year, one of the girls in my group had a birthday party. Her parents drove two vans full of adolescent girls to the Park City Mall in Lancaster. I was so excited. I had never been to such a large shopping mall. As we hurried through the multitude of stores, the other girls neatly tucked bills which donned the faces of Grant and Franklin into their Coach wallets.
I clung tightly to the generous twenty dollars my mom managed to spare me as I shoved it in my back pocket. We went to all the brand name stores where I claimed to shop all the time. We spent hours shopping. All I could afford was one pair of pants. They were two sizes too big and on sale. The rest of girls came out with bags full of shirts, skirts, shoes and glittery make-up. I had one bag. The next day was completely different.
The next day at school, none of my friend would talk to me. They all made fun of the size of my pants and the fact that my mom could only give me twenty dollars to go shopping. I tried to make excuses, but the jig was up. I was discovered. I was not rich. I did not shop where they shopped, my mom was not a lawyer, and I did not live in a mansion. For the next few months none of my popular friend would talk to me because I was not rich, and none of my old friends would talk to me because I had spent the past three years making fun of them.
During this time I did a lot of thinking. I had spent the past three years of my life trying to fit in. During that time I made fun of other people because they were not like my friends. I made fun of them because they were not rich, not smart, not pretty, and not popular. I spent three years of my life pretending to be someone I was not. In actuality, I was just like all those people I made fun of, and where did it get me? Nowhere. Everyone hated me. I had no friends, no one to talk to, and no one to laugh with or cry with. I was all alone.
My time alone made me realize fitting in was not everything. Popularity does not really matter if you are not being yourself. What is the point of being friends with someone if you can not even be yourself around them? Why should be constantly walking on eggshells for the approval of these people?
The whole time I was friends with those girls it never occurred to me that they were not really friends with me. They were friends with the person I pretended to be, and, as it turns out, they did not like the real me. It took all of that to make me realize they were never my friends. Friends are people that like you for you and do not make you pretend to be someone you are not.
After sixth grade I started to live my life differently. I began to hang out with people who shared my interests. I realized that just because you are rich does not mean you have manners or good morals. It turned out that most of the people I spent my time making fun of were better and more interesting people than any of my other "friends." After sixth grade I started to do things that made me happy.
I would talk to everyone whether they were cool or not because I knew how it felt to be an outcast, and no one deserves to feel like that. I made friends with different groups of people in different grades. I enjoyed talking to everyone and slowly made some very close friends. I began to learn what really mattered in life. It was not popularity, money or clothes, but rather honesty, trust, and lasting relationships.
Looking back now, I could not be more thankful that this experience happened to me. Though I was young the important lessons that I learned have been carried with me every day since then through high school and now in college. I really feel that the experience made me become a better person. In a big city like Philadelphia there are all kinds of people from all walks of life, and now I have no problem talking to every one of these unique people.
It amazes me how many interesting people I may have never met had I still believed that fitting in was more important than just being myself. I have no worries about "coolness" and "popularity." I have no desire to go out to parties to get mindlessly drunk because it is what everyone does. I do things to make me happy, not to make other people happy.
It is sad that it took the betrayal of my friends to make me realize what was really important in life, but had that never of happened I would have never learned to live life in a way that makes me happy. I still might have believed money is the most important thing in life, that being liked is more important than being myself, and, sadly, I may still have believed everyone needs a different pair of shoes for each day of the week.
Bucks County Courier Times (Levittown, PA)
December 4, 2005
But today's tyrants may also wear lip gloss and skirts, and they are armed with the weapons of gossip, rumor and exclusion. Their "punches" may not draw blood, but the emotional and psychological scars are very real.
Movies such as "Mean Girls" and the television adaptation of the book "Odd Girl Out" have brought the topic of female bullying to center stage. Although these movies may be exaggerated for dramatic effect, the core of the problem remains the same - name-calling, gossiping, verbal harassment, excluding some and forcing others to feel they must conform to a certain ideal and style.
And thanks to the prevalence of technology such as the Internet, instant messaging and cell phones, a new breed of mean girls has emerged.
But there are efforts under way to address and combat the real-life problems. One such initiative is being made locally.
This fall, Pennridge Central Middle School started Club Ophelia, a weekly meeting of about 20 middle school girls and five high school mentors who sit down together and share their thoughts about female bullying. The club pulls together girls from a cross section of the school's population - those dressed head to toe in black with dark liner under their eyes sit alongside those wearing pastel T-shirts and pink lip gloss.
Club Ophelia was started by Cheryl Dellasega, a professor at Penn State, and is a 12-week program to address what is dubbed "relational aggression." Named for the tragic woman in Shakespeare's "Hamlet," the club is meant to keep today's girls from becoming like Ophelia - defined by the men around her and lost in her own universe.
Stacey DeMichele, eighth-grade counselor at Pennridge Central, attended training last year and helped bring the club to her school. The girls talk about everything from how to treat one another to how women are portrayed in the mass media.
"A majority of girls are caught up in this. It's tough not to. (They need to) be aware of it, their own behaviors, and choose not to add to it," said DeMichele. "Girls kind of lose themselves in adolescence. We make (the club) a safe space with respect and confidentiality."
An estimated 30 percent of American children, or 5.7 million, are either the tormenters or the victims of bullies, according to the National Youth Violence Prevention Resource Center, developed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and other federal organizations.
Club Ophelia is not the only local initiative to combat the problem. State Sen. Stewart Greenleaf, an Eastern Montgomery County Republican, has introduced legislation that would require school districts to establish programs to educate students and staff on how to identify and treat bullying. While some districts have set up programs, Greenleaf said there "needs to be some uniformity, not just develop on a school-by-school basis."
The lawmaker said he was stirred to action by seeing events such as Columbine. He wants the problem to be addressed in schools long before incidents turn violent. "There are ways to resolve conflicts with adults," including the civil and criminal court systems, "but we've left children alone," he said. "It has a devastating impact."
Last month, Greenleaf joined author Jodee Blanco at William Tennent High School in Warminster to talk about these issues. Blanco's book "Please Stop Laughing at Me" is a firsthand account of her childhood spent as a victim of bullies.
Students and teachers say the problem is no longer confined to the hallways of a school. With the Internet, bullying spreads instantly to what may seem like an infinite audience.
"Technology has made it much more prevalent," DeMichele said. "It used to be note writing and the telephone. (Now) once you hit send, it's out there. It's a hidden world from adults."
Instant messaging is one vehicle for torment, but even the telephone can be a tool.
The girls in Club Ophelia describe a call where a person is tricked into saying something about a third person who has been secretly patched into the call.
Perhaps since time immemorial, teens have grouped each other into cliques - there are geeks and Goths, preps and posers, skaters and jocks. The names may change with each generation, but the idea and the exclusion remain the same.
"It's really sad," but it happens automatically, said 13-year-old Shealene Peniston, who joined Club Ophelia because she "thought it would be fun."
On one Tuesday afternoon after the school was nearly deserted for the night, Peniston and the girls of Club Ophelia were busy designing their own T-shirts to show the world who they are and the kind of messages they want to convey. Shealene's shirt reads, "I'm not a doormat," while her neighbor's says, "Listen to your heart."
These messages stand in direct contrast to a recent line of shirts put out by Abercrombie & Fitch. The teen clothing company's female shirts bore lines such as, "I had a nightmare I was a brunette" and "Who needs brains when you have these?" But a group of girls in Pittsburgh started a "girlcott" of the shirts, and after some national attention, Abercrombie & Fitch agreed to stop selling them.
It's messages such as these, whether they are on a shirt or a page in a magazine, that play into the problem. The Club Ophelia girls tick off shows such as "America's Next Top Model," "Laguna Beach" and "The Simple Life" as examples of negative images of women. Yet, they admit they tune in each week. But they also watch shows such as "Zoey 101" - a Nickelodeon program about a couple of girls thriving at an all-boys school - which they say provides the counter message.
Eighth-grader Melanie Manion is optimistic that this culture can change. It just takes one person, one show, and it can eventually trickle down to schools and friends. She's seen some changes already. New to the Pennridge district, Melanie said you had to wear Hollister and Abercrombie clothes to be cool in her old school. Here, you can wear pajama pants with Payless shoes, and no one would say anything.
Tara Reigle also may provide the middle-schoolers with some hope. The 17-year-old is one of the club's mentors and says things do improve at the high school level. "Stuff I thought was a big problem (back then seems) petty now."
Hilary Bentman can be reached at 215 538-6380 or hbentman@phillyBurbs.com.
Section: LOCAL
Edition: DAILY EDITION1
Page: 6C
Teen girls join together to combat peer pressure
HILARY BENTMAN
COURIER TIMES
Club Ophelia brings together middle school girls to talk about the problem of female bullying.For many people, the word "bully" conjures up the image of a large boy, using brute force and intimidation to push kids out of his way and steal their lunch money.
? 2006 Calkins Media, Inc. All rights reserved.
