Taming Wild Girls

By Jeffrey Kluger/Hummelstown

You can tell things aren't going to end well the moment the little cluster of girls starts to talk. Amanda, a junior at Lower Dauphin Middle School in Hummelstown, Pa., is in the cafeteria, commiserating with her friends about a monster test they all just took. Her friends are sure they tanked it, but Amanda has no such worries. "I aced it," she says airily, "but that's just me." As she gets up to clear her tray, the other girls exchange narrowed looks. "Let's trip her," one suggests. Another one nods, goes after Amanda and in an instant sends her sprawling.

The scene is a nasty one--or it would be if the girls meant any harm. But they don't. There is no real tray, no real cafeteria, and Amanda's tumble was a planned pratfall. The students are merely role-playing, acting out a Kabuki version of the girl-on-girl aggression they are increasingly finding in their school. The teachers noticed it too and have taken steps to stop it.

"O.K.," says Pam Eberly, a health and physical-education teacher who helped the girls stage the exercise. "What happened here? Who was the bully? Who were the bystanders? And what could you have done so that things turned out differently?"

The role playing at Lower Dauphin is part of a new program called Club Ophelia that the school initiated to stem the problem of violence among its girls. And Club Ophelia is just one of a few programs in the U.S. that educators are putting in place to tame a group of girls who--to hear teachers and psychologists tell it--have suddenly found their feral side.

The take-no-prisoners pitilessness teenage girls can show one another is nothing new. Pitch-perfect movies such as Mean Girls and Thirteen elevated awareness of the behavior, while shelves of advice books help parents and girls get through those angry years. But while the kids may be acquiring better tools to deal with cliques and cattishness, few are skilled at surviving a darker part of the schoolgirl power struggles: physical violence.

Popular stereotype doesn't always make room for the idea of violent girls, but they are there--and they are acting out. In 2003, according to the Centers for Disease Control, more than 40% of boys admitted to having carried a gun or a knife or been in at least one physical fight in the previous year. But the girls were not far behind, at 25%. And when the violence is girl-on-girl, it can get especially ugly. Deborah Prothrow-Stith, co-author of Sugar & Spice and No Longer Nice: How We Can Stop Girls' Violence and professor of public health at the Harvard School of Public Health, meets with teachers and administrators around the country and is taken aback by what she hears. "Principals talk about not only the increased number of girl fights but also the savagery," she says. "One of them told me, 'We never had to call an ambulance here until girls started fighting.'"

Experts agree that girls can be a handful, but they can't agree on why. One explanation is the Kill Bill culture--a reference to the famously bloody movie and its famously lethal female protagonist. If generations of boys found their mojo imitating the likes of Bruce Lee and James Bond, why shouldn't girls be equally juiced at the sight of a jumpsuited, sword-wielding Uma Thurman? ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY (a sister publication of TIME), recently ran an online list of Hollywood's 15 best "Butt-Kicking Babes," from the pugilistic Hilary Swank to the gun-toting Charlie's Angels. A few of the stars were of older vintage, but most made their screen bones in the last generation.

Then there is the Internet. Girls have traditionally practiced not so much physical aggression as relational aggression--battles of cutting words, frosty looks and exclusion from cliques. E-mail makes it easy for the verbal part of that fragging to go on around the clock. Says Cheryl Dellasega, a humanities professor at Penn State's College of Medicine and creator of the Ophelia clubs: "They go back and forth on the computer all night, and the next day they're ready to fight."

Whatever the cause of all the combat, it is groups such as Club Ophelia that are making the peace. Dellasega founded the clubs in 2002 after the publication of her first book, Surviving Ophelia, about the struggles girls face growing up. One of the principles behind the groups is that girls tend to be tenacious about their anger, with resentments continuing to simmer long after the fisticuffs have ended. Most boys, always thought of as brawlers, are raised from birth on the idea of avoiding fights or at least ending them with a handshake. Girls need to learn the same lessons. More than 400 teachers and guidance counselors have taken Dellasega's workshops, and groups are sprouting up nationwide.

An Ophelia group consists of about 30 girls, two adult counselors and five or six mentors, who are one or two grades above the other girls and sometimes Ophelia graduates themselves. Teachers and administrators pick the participants, looking for girls who are aggressors, victims or enabling bystanders. The groups meet in 12 weekly sessions of 90 min. each. Most meetings begin with cooperation exercises such as forming hand-holding circles with all the girls' arms crisscrossing in the middle, and then trying to untangle without releasing hands. Sullen teens and tweens would not seem the best candidates for such an exercise, but at Lower Dauphin, they go at it gamely. "This is not for speed," Eberly reminds them. "Go slowly and listen to one another."

After the exercise and role playing, the girls retreat to the school's art room, where they work together on creative projects and brainstorm nonviolent solutions to hypothetical situations the instructors present them with. They also discuss powerful--and peaceable--women they admire. The list the teachers compile includes Oprah Winfrey, J.K. Rowling and Laura Bush. The girls' nominees mostly include teachers and guidance counselors and often their mothers.

Ophelia is not the only program doing that work. As long ago as 1986, the Seattle-based Committee for Children introduced its Second Step program, a classroom-based regimen that teaches anger management and impulse control. The program, which has been tested in a remarkable 25,000 schools, is aimed at younger kids--ages 4 to 14--and makes no distinction between boys and girls. But nowadays, says Joan Cole Duffell, the Committee's director of partnership development, girls "are beginning to express anger in ways more similar to boys." Other, independent groups are appearing elsewhere, such as Images of Me, a girls-only self-awareness program in District Heights, Md., that teaches mediation and communication skills.

Nobody pretends that programs or mentoring can roll back the girls' behavior all the way--nor should it. Says Erika Karres, a retired teacher who once worked in the North Carolina school system: "You have to teach kids that it's good to have anger because it helps you get things out." The trick, of course, is learning to master the difference between assertiveness and aggressiveness, confidence and swagger.

With reporting by Melissa August/Washington, Jeanne McDowell/Los Angeles