Girl-on-girl crime

by Kristen Englert on January 19, 2010

Kind Campaign founders Lauren Parsekian (far left) and Molly Stroud (far right) with a group of cheerleaders in Portland, Oregon. Their aim is stop girls from bullying one another.

Bullying comes in all shapes and forms. For males, it’s often about pushing, shoving and hitting. But among girls, there’s also a lot of gossiping, rumours and social exclusion.

The difference between bullying among boys and bullying among girls is quite extreme, says Pepperdine University’s marriage and family therapist, Robert Scholz. While boys want to appear “macho,” girls often want to get ahead in the race for “queen bee.” With that comes the idea of social exclusion, best described as the situation where certain groups of friends exclude others based on popularity rankings and differences.

“It’s a problem that we see quite often, and it typically leads to other mental problems down the line,” says Scholz.

The idea of queen bee is hard to stop, especially when this culture seems to be entirely consumed with it, as seen in movies like Mean Girls, The In Crowd and Clueless. And with PerezHilton.com and TMZ as the most highly viewed sites on the web, it’s hard to combat the idea that gossip is bad.

Over the past five years, the increase in girl bullying has become so alarming that it’s caught the attention of teachers, administrators, media outlets, and girls everywhere.

According to the National Youth Violence Prevention Center, almost 30 per cent of youth in the United States—over 5.7 million—are estimated to be involved in the act of bullying. And according to a 2004 study published in the Medical Journal of Pediatrics, one in seven Canadian children aged 11 to 16 are victims of bullying. 43 per cent of girls fear harassment in the bathroom and yet statistics reveal that only 15 per cent will actually tell someone that they are being bullied.

With the rise of YouTube, bullying “how-to’s” are becoming more accessible. Now, instead of hiding the fact that one is a bully, putting it on YouTube makes one a more credible bully, bringing this issue more and more into the light. By posting fights online, it’s as if bullies are trying to make themselves famous.

In July 2008, Jesse Logan sent a picture text message to her boyfriend. When they broke up, he sent the pictures to hundreds of his closest peers. Three days later she hung herself.

And in March 2008, a brutal girl-on-girl attack in Lakeland, Florida, was videotaped and YouTubed for the entire world to see. After being lured into a friend’s home, 16-year-old Victoria Lindsay was brutally attacked by six of her girl peers, while two boys stood guard, taping the entire event.

Grabbing the attention of ABC, Fox News and Dr. Phil, this event helped coin a new term: Cyber-bullying. The term is used to describe anything from menacing emails to showcasing physical torment on a video site.

The bullying problem has become so widespread that organizations have been created to combat it. The Kind Campaign is a non-profit group that began at Pepperdine University in Los Angeles. Their aim is to end girl-on-girl crime and create awareness about this growing epidemic.

“This is about females being kind to each other, yes. However, it becomes so much more than that when you look at the big picture,” says Lauren Parsekian, who founded the group along with fellow student Molly Stroud. “I think a lot of the world’s problems are due to a lack of human connection and respect for your neighbour. In order to make the world a better place, we must change ourselves as individuals and it starts with being kind.”

On a six-week trip across the country, the founders and their mothers faced this issue first hand, shooting a documentary exposing the importance of the problem. Their main goal is to create an honest dialogue about the issue and bring to light the serious effects that bullying has on young girls.

Because this issue has become such a serious matter in middle and high schools, the Kind Campaign also hopes to help schools deal with this problem in a more efficient manner.

“When bullying becomes even more aggressive,” says Parsekian, “like girls making videos, moms getting involved and female celebrity feuds (you never heard about male celebrity feuds) . . . it all has to stop.”