JoanneKates
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Feb 15, 2006, 12:48 PM
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Girl Cliques at Summer Camp
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by Joanne Kates
I was never popular. Saturday nights in high school, I was the one with nothing to do. Except for two girls (who I didn’t really like) who I relied on for company and to share a pizza. A decade ago a glamorous woman moved in across the street from me. I hadn’t seen her since high school, where she had been a queen bee – the right clothes, hair, friends, and of course boys.
She came over one day. I (still smarting 25 years later) said to her: “You were popular.” She replied: “No, you were.”
There’s the rub, and it’s no better today than when I was a teenager.
As a mother I have been insulated from this reality. My daughter would rather eat nails than tell me she was left off the guest list of a party. Teenage girls maintain a conspiracy of silence about their social struggles because it’s too humiliating to admit, and they’re afraid we’ll tell somebody (a teacher, the parent of the “offenders”), which would make things worse.
They hide how excluded they often feel, and their worry about being left out. I learned this at summer camp. As director of Camp Arowhon in Algonquin Park, Ontario, I discovered the truth of girl cliques by hearing from parents whose daughters felt friendless at camp, and were thus not returning. In the early 90’s I started trying to fix it. First I tried a conflict mediation tool called Peacemaking. It took five years to figure out that Peacemaking couldn’t touch the cliques, because girls kept them secret.
Next I tried Bully Interventions. They work, if a victim is willing to come forward. As with Peacemaking, our anti-bullying work can’t touch the cliques because of the protection racket the girls run, and also because social exclusion is usually more complicated than one or two bullies against one or two victims.
This is what it looks like:
The scene: A cabin at summer camp.
The players: Four 14 year old girls
The dinner bell rings. Three of the girls stand up (as if on cue) and leave the cabin. They’re walking to dinner together. Not one word has been spoken. Girl number four has been left alone in the cabin.
The back story: The three girls are in the clique. They know it, and girl number four knows it. Everybody knows girl number four is out. Not a word had to be spoken for an act of rejection to occur - while the counselor was in the bathroom. That part was also on purpose.
Teenage girls in camps and schools have rigid unstated rules about which group every girl belongs in. First there’s the popular group. They are the cool girls, the lookers, the wealthy (although money doesn’t guarantee membership.), the ones the boys like. Right beside them (but never at their table in the cafeteria or in their tight little group at camp) are the wannabes. These girls are almost cool. They’re so close to cool it hurts; they want it so badly that if a wannabe gets a phone call from a cool girl an hour before a party, she’ll get excited and hurry over there, even though she knows they only want her tonight because the person they really wanted couldn’t come. Then there are girls who aren’t popular, don’t wannabe so badly, but they have their own friends. At the bottom of the pecking order are the loners, the nerds, the losers.
I found that out when I started asking girls about social cruelty. I asked teenage girls to draw “social maps” of school and camp. They recognize the terms and can put every girl they know (including themselves) in a group on the “social map".
It’s easy to explain this meanness by saying girls are inherently bitchy. Hogwash! In her book Odd Girl Out, Rachel Simmons talks about girls being socialized to be nice, and good, so they have no outlets for anger. Thus, she writes, “to elude social disapproval, girls retreat beneath a surface of sweetness to hurt each other in secret.” And because nothing matters as much to an adolescent girl as friendship, writes Simmons, “relationship is used as a weapon… and friendship itself can become a tool of anger.” Instead of getting angry like guys do, in a brief (and often satisfyingly profane) outburst, when girls are angry at a friend, their only weapon is the friendship itself.
Except in extreme cases (a la Reena Virk) girls’ aggression is covert, and relational. They shift alliances, they turn people against the target of their anger. Which is why even popular girls worry about getting kicked out of the clique. It can happen any time, because the withdrawal of friendship is girls’ only weapon.
The good news is that we can help them. When I realized that Peacemaking and Bully Interventions weren’t fixing cliques, I found Girls' Circle Association (www.girlscircle.com) in California and bought their curriculum kit on Girls Circles. For six summers now we’ve been following their plan for leading girls’ cabin groups in conversations about personal issues. We did other stuff too: Instead of hiring the coolest counselors to work with the adolescent girls (like camps usually do) we started choosing young women with a strong moral compass for the adolescents – counselors who could and would call it like it is when queen bees exclude wannabes from the group. We started talking more with the staff about these “girl issues,” and setting expectations for them about noticing on it and acting on it. And our camp has changed profoundly! The girls now know very clearly that we don’t tolerate cliquish behavior, and they know we’re on the lookout for it. They’ve become more inclusive and more empathic to one another. I watch closely, I see this.
Girls Circles raise empathy for others and help girls learn to voice their conflicts, thus reducing their motivation to hurt each other via social aggression. The topics include tough friendship issues, body image, boy stuff.
All girls deserve this support. Schools, where social exclusion incubates daily, don’t deal with this hidden peer curriculum, which is so powerful that it distracts girls from the three R’s. It’s time for parents to pressure schools to lead Girls Circles. I know from my experience at camp that if every Grade Eight class had a Girls Circle twice a week for 40 minutes, their world would change.
Joanne Kates is a highly successful freelance writer in Canada and the US and is the Director of Camp Arowhon in Algonquin Park, Ontario
She is the author of Exploring Algonquin Park: The Personal and Complete Guide
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(This post was edited by JoanneKates on Feb 16, 2006, 2:52 PM)
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