Word: ophelia
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...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...
...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...
...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...
...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...