Sunday, February 13, 2011
Researchers Look for Ways to Curb "Mean Girls" and Gossip
This article focuses on the increasing need to recognize and diminish "relational aggression" in schools. I was actually quite surprised that this is a "new" idea, since to me it seems obvious that the majority of bullying begins with "relational" aggression - in other words, the interwoven psychological effect of gossip, ostracizing, and cliques on the victims, bullies and bystanders. While the more physically violent bullying is extremely obvious, this more subtle form of aggression (I believe) is what leads up to the violence - especially in girls, who tend to be just a vicious but in a sneaky way that is harder to detect. What was bothersome to me is when a group of researchers and teachers in Seattle observed students on the playground, while the researchers were able to easily identify "semi-public relational bullying", the teachers could not. As a victim of this type of aggression myself in seventh grade, I can attest to how frightening and depressing it can be, and as a prospective teacher I believe having training on how to recognize the signs and immediately diffuse the situation is paramount to the well being of the student body. Children need to learn empathy for one another, and I think with the desensitizing that goes on between violent video games, graphic reality television, and the wide range of images readily available on the Internet this is becoming a greater challenge for parents and educators alike. To me it seems more than worth the class time to require social consciousness courses in early adolescence (fifth and sixth grade, just when hormones and peer pressure begin to kick into gear), in the hopes that we can head off some of these behavior patterns later on.
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Thank you for this post.
ReplyDeleteI wonder, though, how much students feel emotionally battered by coercion to attend school, to work on the assignments for class (or receive bad grades and a stigmatic identity) and to comply with the official rules and dispositions. Granted, schooling has long served a socializing function. But how different is what schools do to students from what students do to each other?
I suppose so; life in general is seen as coersive during childhood, especially in the teenage years, where everyone is telling you what you can and cannot do. But as we learned in Ed Psych, teenagers brains aren't developed enough to handle the vast decisions that come up during these years alone, and to leave them with no structure would be much worse than submitting them to a taste of the rules they will face in greater society. Except that instead of detention, they land in prison. Or to divorce court. As I tell my eight year old when he complains about too many rules, adults face far more rules than any child on a daily basis; we just have the "right" to break them and accept consequences far larger than those they face.
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