Taming Wild Girls

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.'"