Anti-bullying for girls in Nassau yeshivot

By Michael Orbach

A new anti-bullying program for girls is available to Jewish schools in Nassau County.

“Girls can be mean,” pointed out Sara Diament, the Jewish liaison for the Girl Scouts of Nassau County, which developed the program.

“People think of bullying generally as a male model of a bully: an aggressive eleven year old getting a kid in the corner to steal his lunch money,” she explained. “Girls bully as well. Instead of the violence — usually there isn’t - it is more in terms of manipulating another person’s relationship with their friend.”

Girls who bully other girls are subtler than male bullies, she explained, and when a girl is a bully, there usually is an underlying issue.

“She’s trying to get her emotional needs met by putting down someone else. On the one hand, the bullies are very strong social leaders - alpha girls, queen bees. They appear very powerful in their ability to control. They’re savvy, but underneath that veneer there are issues of being anxious and the fear of rejection. Instead of allowing themselves to be rejected they’re doing the rejecting. A lot of times girls who are bullying have critical and dominating fathers.”

The Girl Scouts of Nassau County program was adapted for Jewish schools and provided free of charge thanks to a grant from the Jewish Women’s Foundation.

It is being offered for girls from 1st to 8th grade, which Diament says includes what is considered the peak age for bullying: middle school. She works with teachers and offers parenting classes.

Girls who are bullied are at risk to develop low self-esteem and possibly become used to being treated inappropriately in later relationships, she warned.

“When it becomes a romantic relationship they will also expect behavior from a potential mate that we would not consider healthy... It extends from childhood with repercussions later,” she said.

“It’s painful to think that [in] a yeshiva or a Hebrew school you would have a situation when girls are behaving like that,” she said. “We don’t want it to be true, especially when we invest a lot of time in bein adom l’chaveiro (interpersonal relationships). We are trying to drill that into our children; it’s hard to see why we’d need this. If schools are doing the supplemental programming, why would there even be an issue? We’d rather wish there wasn’t an issue.”

Most schools have been quite receptive to the program, so far, and “no one is denying” the problem exists, Diament said.