With the broadcast of the second season of "Dark Glory", school violence has once again become a hot topic of discussion. In the play, the protagonist Wen Dongen suffered from the collective bullying of a small gang of five classmates when he was in middle school.
The bully burned Moon's arm with a curling iron, leaving shocking scars. According to media reports, the "curling iron hot man" plot has actually happened in some high schools in South Korea. Perhaps it is precisely because of this horrific way of violence that we who watch the drama in front of the screen look forward to Wen Dongen being able to complete the revenge plan without leaving a trace of kindness to the abuser.
The bullying suffered by Wen Dongen is a visible direct attack, however, more often than not, girls are subjected to invisible hidden bullying.
The conflict between girls is easily understated: "Girls are like this". In fact, the public's attitude towards aggression depends on gender, if men are aggressive and aggressive, most people think that this is due to nature, and for women, they are more likely to be "good girls" and not easily show aggression.
Different social expectations make bullying between girls more difficult to see, Rachel Simmons pointed out in the book "The Underground War of Girls": girls are forced to get involved in a game of aggression while trying to be friendly and maintain a perfect relationship.
Hidden attack culture in girls
Excerpt from Rachel Simmons' "The Girls' Underground War"
01
Bullying is more than just direct attacks
Early experiments on aggression rarely included women, and because men tended to exhibit direct aggression, the researchers concluded that it was the only way to attack. In their observational studies, other types of attacks were understood as deviations from the norm or simply ignored. Research on bullying also inherits loopholes from earlier attack studies.
Most psychologists focus on direct aggression such as punching, threats, or provocations. Scientists also measure aggression in environments where indirect aggression is almost impossible to observe. Looking at the girl's social life through the eyes of a scientist, everything seems calm and calm.
In 1992, some people finally began to question what was hidden behind these appearances. That year, a team of Norwegian researchers published an unprecedented study of girls. They found that girls were not insulated from aggressive behavior, but used non-traditional ways to express anger. Since cultural rules do not allow girls to engage in public aggression, they resort to non-physical forms of aggression. In the study, scientists uncharacteristically began questioning the sweet image of young women, calling their social lives "relentless," "aggressive" and "cruel."
Since then, the psychology research team at the University of Minnesota has identified three types of aggressive behaviors based on the above findings: relationship aggression, indirect aggression and social aggression.
"Relationship aggression" includes the following: "Hurting others by damaging (or threatening to impair) relationships or feelings arising from interpersonal acceptance, friendship, or group integration." "Relationship aggression includes punishing others or fulfilling one's own wishes by ignoring them, using social exclusion to achieve revenge, using negative body language or facial expressions, deliberately damaging relationships, and threatening the other person to agree to a certain request by breaking off friendship. In these acts, the attacker uses her relationship with the target as a weapon.
Similarly, indirect aggression and social aggression are conducted. "Indirect attacks" allow attackers to avoid direct conflict with their targets. This is a covert act, and the attacker does not appear to intend to harm the other person. One of the ways to attack indirectly is to use other people as tools to make the target suffer, such as spreading rumors. "Social aggression" aims to damage the target's self-esteem or social status in a circle, and includes indirect aggression, such as spreading rumors or social exclusion. I refer to these behaviors collectively as "alternative attacks."
Some offbeat aggressions have successfully escaped the eyes of adults. To escape the blame, girls will retreat beneath the sweet surface and hurt each other silently. They quietly make eye contact, pass notes, secretly control others for long periods of time, embarrass other girls in the hallway, turn around, whisper, smile. These behaviors, mainly to escape detection and punishment, are more common in middle-class settings, where femininity is most demanding.
In fact, girls can quietly start a war. My friend Astrid recalled angry friends as a silent but methodical battle of perpetuation. "I didn't read the note, they wrote on the spine of the encyclopedia near my desk, on other desks, everywhere, and added my name to the list of students sent to the principal's office." "This attack was used precisely to escape the eyes of adult spies.
Implicit aggression is used not only to avoid punishment, but mostly because it does not look like bullying itself. Girls know how powerful the image of gentleness and loveliness is. While adults are otherwise wary, sweet images can confuse the detection radars of teachers and parents. For girls, this secret, this "underground space" – where girls bury their true feelings – can hardly be said to be unconscious.
02
Relationships play an important role in a girl's social development
Not allowing certain girls to eat lunch together, not allowing them to attend parties, not allowing them to put their sleeping bags with others or not allowing them to squeeze into giggling circles may seem very childish at first glance. However, Carol Gilligan's research shows that relationships play an important role in a girl's social development. Girls see isolation as a danger in their daily lives, and are especially worried about being abandoned because they are different; Boys believe that the danger is falling into a trap or suffocation.
According to Gilligan, this contrast suggests that women's development "goes straight to the other side of human emotion, emphasizing continuity and flexibility rather than substitution and separation." Relationships and emotions are at the forefront of women's lives, which means they feel and react differently to loss." The centrality of relationships in a girl's life allows for another form of aggression and bullying that has separate characteristics and needs to be studied separately.
To understand girls' conflict, it is necessary to understand girls' intimacy, because intimacy and danger are often inseparable. The intimacy of girls' relationships is central to analysing their aggressive behavior, and they loved each other very passionately before girls fell in love with boys.
Girls enjoy unrestricted intimacy. Boys are encouraged not to rely on their mothers and to develop the emotional control required for masculinity. Daughters are expected differently, and adults encourage girls to identify with their mother's nurturing behavior. Girls spend their entire childhood practicing caring for each other, and their enjoyment of intimacy and human connection begins with interactions with best friends.
However, we live in a culture that ignores the intimacy of female friends. Many people believe that women should leave their most sincere feelings to men and pour their love into their husbands and children. It is assumed that the rest of a girl's life stage is just practice, and there may be those who consider these stages irrelevant.
In fact, it is the girls' deep knowledge of relationships and the great passion they put into close friends that shape the important characteristics of their attacks. The most painful attacks often stem from the closest friendships, and shared secrets and knowledge of friends' weaknesses fuel the harm.
In addition, the relationship itself often becomes a girl's weapon. In a normal conflict, two people use words, voices or fists to resolve disputes, and on the matter, it will have no impact on the relationship between the two. However, if anger cannot be expressed, or if the person concerned is not equipped to deal with the conflict, it is difficult to address the problem in a targeted manner. If neither of the two girls wants to be "unfriendly," the friendship could be in crisis. If no other tools exist in the conflict, the relationship itself may become a weapon.
Good girls and "perfect" girls are expected to be fully in a good relationship, and then losing this relationship and being alone becomes a sharp weapon for girls to implicitly attack the culture.
Sociologist Anne Campbell found in interviews with adults that men see aggression as a way to control the environment and defend dignity, while women believe aggression ends the relationship they are in. I found the same attitude when talking to girls. For girls, even everyday conflict can end a relationship, not to mention a sudden outbreak of serious attacks, and they reject even the most basic forms of conflict. They have a simple equation in mind: conflict = loss. As if clockwork, the girls said the same thing in different ways, one after the other: "I can't tell her what I really think, otherwise I won't be friends." The logic behind it is: "I don't want to hurt anyone directly, because I want to be friends with everyone." ”
The fear of loneliness has overwhelming power. In fact, the most common thing that bullying targets recall to me is loneliness. Cruel things did happen—bad emails, anonymous messages, whispered rumors, slanderous handwriting on tables, walls and cabinets, bursts of laughter and invective—but it was the girl who completely broke down. With no one around to whisper and share secrets, it seems that the girls will cause deep sorrow and fear, and almost destroy them.
Girls avoid being alone at all costs, including maintaining a sadistic friendship.
03
Just the growth stage?
Sherry's friends suddenly stopped talking to her, and the father was worried about his overwhelmed daughter, so he contacted the mother of one of Sherry's friends to find out the situation. The mother dismissed: "Girl." She said that this is typical girl behavior, don't worry, girls have to go through such a stage, it will pass. Her comments reflect a common attitude towards alternative aggression among girls: Girl bullying is a "rite of passage" that is good to wait for this stage.
Many people believe that girl bullying is a growing storm that has to be experienced and sharpens people's hearts. However, this transitional etiquette theory desensitizes us and prevents us from thinking about how culture shapes girls' behavior patterns. Worse, it also poses a barrier to developing responses to anti-bullying behavior.
Transitional etiquette theory implies several troubling assumptions. First, the theory implies that because of their formative years, we cannot discourage girls from engaging in such behaviour. In other words, given that a large number of girls have had alternative aggression, it must be by nature. Theories of bullying as transitional etiquette also suggest that girls need to learn to get along in this way, even as a positive mode of interaction. The third hypothesis is a corollary to the first two theories: since meanness among girls is universal and gainful, then this is their natural attribute in the social structure and should be tolerated and psychologically prepared. The last assumption that is most rampant is that abuse between girls is not abuse at all.
I have heard of schools refusing to intervene in conflicts between girls, saying they do not want to interfere in the "love lives" of students. This logic implies two value judgments about the girl's relationship: First, it implies that the girl's alternative aggression is different from the heterosexual aggression that lawyers are keen to analyze and the evening news programs overwhelm, implying that it is insignificant and will naturally decrease when girls and boys have more contact.
Second, the theory downplays the important role that peers play in child development, giving rise to the school policy fallacy that childhood is "training for life," not life itself. The non-intervention policy denies the existence of real friendships between girls, avoids the core issues of their interpersonal conflicts, and underestimates the strong emotions that can leave a permanent imprint on self-esteem.
But there is a simpler reason why schools ignore girls' aggression: they need to maintain order. Usually, boys have serious disciplinary problems. Girls can keenly smell adult stress, and they know how to pass a note with a bad word or quickly fly a mean look and then withdraw it, which is difficult to attract the attention of a tired teacher. Instead of solving relationship problems, teachers prefer to spend their time yelling at boys.
04
It is not their fault that they have been attacked in an alternative way
Because alternative aggression is grossly neglected, people often view the manifestation of this behavior through the lens of more "reasonable" social relationships. For example, in many schools, the threat to "I'll cut you off if I don't do something" is seen as peer pressure, not relationship attack. In academic papers, researchers explain girls' relationship manipulation behavior as precocious puberty, or as a way to "establish a central position and divide the boundaries of the dominant group." Some psychologists classify teasing or malicious jokes as healthy experiences growing up, and spread gossip as "keeping boundaries."
It is also a common misconception that girls who are treated harshly lack social skills. The logic of this statement is that if the child is targeted by bullying and social abuse by others, the child must have done something wrong. This often places the blame on the bullying target, who believes that the child being bullied should be stronger or needs to learn to be gregarious. Maybe she doesn't respond appropriately to social situations, fails to properly "read" other people's feelings and attitudes, maybe she needs to pay more attention to clothing trends, maybe she lacks social skills and is too bold.
Relationship attacks can easily be seen as a social skills problem. If a girl is kind today but cruel tomorrow, or shows a strong possessiveness, overreacts to another child, it may be interpreted as immature. This is a particularly dangerous problem – because adults may persuade the target to be patient with their peers and show due respect to the attacker. In the process, the aggressiveness of the behavior is erased and the adult allows the attacker to do whatever he wants.
More worryingly, the subject's feelings of injury were real, but denied by adults. The attacker is often a friend, and the girl is more sympathetic about this and easily shows endless help and understanding for the friend's flaws.
In a culture that requires girls to maintain perfect relationships at all costs, it is natural to misdiagnose bullying as a social skills issue. Proponents of social skills say the best interpersonal interactions are those that are situational, responsive and recognized by others, and reflect a girl's friendliness. However, most incidents of female bullying are carried out at the behest of small circle leaders, whose power derives from the ability to maintain the apparent quiet of girls while continuing to abuse their peers in secret. Similarly, she also dominates the direction of social consensus in small groups. From the perspective of social skills that schools care about, girls who show bullying behavior are perfect and decent in the eyes of everyone.
The problem with social skills is that it does not question the existence of mean behavior, but instead tries to explain and rationalize it. In this way, this argument makes the behavior of the alternative attacker justified.
As a result, while the girl tries to be friendly and maintain a perfect relationship, she is also forced to get involved in a game of aggression. Sometimes, their anger breaks the surface of kindness; Sometimes anger can run beneath the surface of kindness, sending puzzling signals to peers. As a result, female friends are forced to think twice and figure out each other's true intentions. Over time, many girls lose trust in how others describe their feelings.
Suppressing anger not only changes the way girls express aggression, but also the way anger is perceived. Anger may come and go, causing the target to question what really happened — or if nothing happened. "Was she joking or did she take it seriously?" "She just rolled her eyes?" "Is it intentional not to leave a seat?" "She told me she would invite me, but she didn't?"
If we can list all kinds of alternative aggressions – both overt and covert – girls can muster the courage to confront them. We need to freeze these fleeting moments and define them out loud so that girls don't have to wonder what happened, and they understand when they are attacked differently that it's not their fault.
Source: "Dark Glory" and "Young You"