Odd Girl Out Read Free

tried to forget. Indeed, this has long been one of girlhood's dark, dirty secrets. Nearly every woman and girl has a story. It is time to break the silence.
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    I set out to interview girls between the ages of ten and fourteen, the years when bullying peaks. On my first day, I worked with several groups of ninth graders at a coed private school on the East Coast. My plan was to encourage an informal discussion guided by a list of questions I'd written down. Standing before each class, I introduced myself, explained my own history with bullying, and told the girls what we'd be discussing. Without fail, the girls would do a double take.
Talking about
what?
During class?
They snickered and whispered.
    I started each session with the same question: "Do you think there are differences between the ways guys are mean to each other and the ways girls are mean to each other?" The whispering stopped. Then the hands flew like streamers. Suddenly, they couldn't talk fast enough. Their banter was electric. The girls hooted, screeched, laughed, snorted, and veered off into personal stories, while notes flew around the room, accompanied by rolling eyes and searing and knowing glances.
    It was exhausting. My carefully organized list of research questions grew stale in my hand.
    Not a single one of my group discussions that day went according to plan. This, it turned out, was a good thing. I quickly understood that trying to box the girls' voices into my prearranged questions would make them think I was an authority figure, and this was the last thing I wanted to be. I wanted
them
to be the authorities. After all, they were living what I was trying to understand. It wasn't a tactic so much as an instinct.
    The girls responded in kind. Over the months that followed, we traded e-mail and instant message handles, talked about music groups, new shoes, summer plans, and crushes. They showed and told me things their teachers and parents couldn't know about. We sometimes strayed from the topic at hand to talk about the pressures of school and family.
    Over time, however, I realized there was another reason for the ease we felt with one another. Most people who talk to kids about bullying approach the issue with the same message: Don't do it. Be nice to each other.
    I came from the opposite place. My assumption was not that the girls ought not to be mean, but that they were; not that they should be nice, but that they weren't. I was there not to stop them, but because I wanted them to help other girls find a way to deal with it. If they wanted to participate in the group discussion, fine; if they didn't, they had to sit quietly and they couldn't bother the ones who did. Either way, I told them, they'd get a free snack out of it.
    More often than not during the sessions, a girl would tell her own story of victimization. She might begin by replying to one of her classmates' remarks, and then, as though taken by surprise, slide into a slow, tearful remembering of her pain. Although I knew I was in the classrooms only to conduct research, I was overwhelmed by feelings of protectiveness toward these girls.
    For this reason, I adhered to an informal discussion format, going with the girls where they wanted to go. Like the women I met on the Internet, many of the girls had never been asked about this part of their lives. Like me, they seemed to feel that they were all alone, the only ones to have gone through this. I met their sadness at the level of my own. They had chosen me to hear their stories, and I wanted to honor their voices. I also wanted them to realize it happened to me and plenty of others. It felt inhumane to move over and through their pain and on to the next question on the list. Sometimes I got through all my questions, sometimes I didn't. If my work suffers in any way, the responsibility is mine, and it's one I am happy to take.
    During this period, I was guided by the work of psychologists Lyn Mikel Brown and Carol Gilligan, to whose