Taming Wild Girls

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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.