American Girls (18 page)

It was the only time they had made her cry.

The subway ride downtown was thirty-five minutes of “hell.” As the train rocketed down the tracks from the Upper West Side, she avoided the looks. “Are you a girl? Are you a boy?” She stared into her phone. She found refuge there. Even if she wasn't really seeing anything on her screen, it protected her from having to face the looks. It was in her phone that she had found relief—“transgender kids on YouTube saved my life; just knowing they were there, hearing them talk and seeing them be strong”—and it was in her phone that she had gazed into “evil.” “People will say anything to you on social media. I've been told I'm ugly, a freak, a fake, an ‘abomination.' That was a good one. I had to look it up. I've been told to kill myself. I'm amazed sometimes I'm still alive because sometimes you want to die from it.”

She knew if she could just hold on she'd make it to a place downtown where she could be herself for a while. But there were always the looks. “It's the eyes.” Eyes that telegraphed confusion or disgust. “Or sometimes they just look at you like you're not there—like they're killing you by
not
looking at you.” And there were comments. “It can come from anyone. You'd be surprised. I've had old men say stuff to me but also like really young girls. I'm like, But how can you hate me for being like you? For being a girl inside? Don't you know they already look down on us as girls?”

She'd found hope in the thought of Jazz, the famous transgender girl, age fifteen, star of her own YouTube channel and reality show (
I Am Jazz
). “I'm not like Jazz,” Montana said. “I'm not a girlie girl.” But she loved Jazz for her honesty and her “realness.” Loved it that when Barbara Walters had asked, “What part of being transgender hurts you the most?” Jazz had said, “My genitalia.” Montana had laughed out loud at that; and then she had wanted to cry. Because Jazz wasn't blaming anyone, she was just being real; but Jazz had parents who supported her in her decision to be who she wanted to be, and Jazz's parents had money to make that happen.

The subway doors opened up and Montana slid into the sea of people.

The problem of bullying came to national attention in 1999, with the mass shooting at Columbine High School. Media reports alleged that Eric Harris, eighteen, and Dylan Klebold, seventeen, had been the victims of bullying, and that this had contributed to their horrible massacre. After another school shooting at a California high school a year later, Attorney General John Ashcroft bemoaned an “onerous culture of bullying.” “Americans were finally paying attention,” wrote Emily Bazelon in
Sticks and Stones: Defeating the Culture of Bullying and Rediscovering the Power of Character and Empathy.
With school shootings up nearly 70 percent in the 1990s over the '80s, the Secret Service and the Department of Education conducted an investigation into the causes of thirty-seven attacks since 1974, finding that, “in several cases, individual attackers had experienced bullying and harassment that was long-standing and severe.”

In the case of Columbine, however, bullying was not ultimately seen as a contributing factor. A lengthy FBI investigation found that Harris was a classic “psychopath” and Klebold a depressive in his thrall. Since Columbine, school shootings have continued to plague the nation; there were thirty-five with fatalities in 2014, almost all of them committed by teenage boys and young men. Cyberbullying has been increasingly discussed in the news as a possible cause, because of its concurrent rise. But according to research by the Cyberbullying Research Center (CRC), one of the leading research organizations on the subject in the country, there hasn't been a single school shooting in the United States resulting directly from cyberbullying.

Meanwhile, we have seen the emergence of a new and equally disturbing phenomenon—cyberbullicides, which the CRC defines as “suicide indirectly or directly influenced by experiences with online aggression.” And many of the victims of cyberbullicide have been girls. There was Megan Meier, the thirteen-year-old Dardenne Prairie, Missouri, girl who hanged herself in her bedroom in 2006 after being catfished on Myspace by her former friend, her friend's mother, Lori Drew, and Drew's teenage employee. There was Rebecca Sedwick, the twelve-year-old Lakeland, Florida, girl who jumped from an industrial tower in 2013 after being cyberbullied by two other girls. “Drink bleach and die,” one of the girls allegedly told her—a cruel reference to Amanda Todd, who once attempted suicide this way. Todd was the fifteen-year-old Canadian girl who killed herself in 2012 after being bullied on- and offline; she had shown herself topless via webcam during a video chat, and an older man screenshotted her image and shared it on Facebook.

It's not known just how many cyberbullying-related deaths have occurred; according to the CRC, “empirical research…is sparse.” The suicide rate of kids ages ten to nineteen dropped between 1990 and 2003, but then started to rise again, according to the CDC. Suicide is still the third leading cause of death in children ages ten to fourteen, and the second leading cause in older teens. In teen suicide, boys are more likely to be successful at committing the act, while girls make more attempts. And cyberbullying victims are nearly twice as likely to have attempted suicide, as well as more likely to have suicidal thoughts, according to the CRC.

Girls are more often the victims of cyberbullying than boys. Studies of how many children and teenagers are cyberbullied vary, but most report more girls than boys being cyberbullied. A 2007 survey by the Pew Research Center found that more than 40 percent of girls ages fifteen to seventeen reported being bullied online, and about 30 percent of boys of the same age. A 2011 report by the CRC found that nearly 25 percent of heterosexual girls had been bullied online, compared with around 16 percent of heterosexual boys. In that same study, more than 38 percent of non-heterosexual girls reported being cyberbullied, and more than 30 percent of non-heterosexual boys. What is similar for all girls, as opposed to heterosexual boys, is that when girls are cyberbullied, they are targeted for their sexuality and sexual behavior.

The cyberbullying of girls “tends to focus on promiscuity or perceived promiscuity,” says Sameer Hinduja, codirector of the CRC. “For girls who are cyberbullied there is a double standard; teen girls are not wanting to come across as prudish, but then when they demonstrate a familiarity with sexuality, they are immediately denigrated. They tend to feel that people give them grief no matter what.”

In the CRC's 2010 report “Victimization of Adolescent Girls,” the results of an online survey of more than 3,000 girls ages eight to seventeen showed 38 percent of girls reporting being cyberbullied. Girls in the survey said that they had been “disrespected” and “ignored” online; they said that they had been threatened physically and called “a host of…unpleasant names,” including “fat,” “ugly,” “slut,” and “bitch.” They reported being teased for “sharing their opinions.” They said that they had been sexually harassed by anonymous strangers: “Behaviors mostly involved unsolicited sexual advances (‘[I] was online playing a game and a guy asked me if [I] wanted to “suck his ****” '), including requests for the victim to ‘cyber' (i.e., engage in cyber sex with) the aggressor.” Girls said that cyberbullying made them feel “ ‘sad,' ‘angry,' ‘upset,' ‘depressed,' ‘violated,' ‘hated,' ‘annoyed,' ‘helpless,' ‘exploited,' ‘stupid and put down'…Some girls said the victimization made them feel unsafe: ‘It makes me scared. I [sometimes don't] know the person so that makes me wonder if [I] have a stalker, and that gets me pretty scared.' ” Some said that they had received death threats. “Adolescent girls do receive online threats,” the CDC report concluded, “ranging from vague warnings…to threats that are…very serious.”

Not every girl who is cyberbullied is going to try to kill herself or have suicidal thoughts, of course; in fact, many girls who experience online harassment also “exhibit healthy resilience to this behavior,” says the CRC. But millions of girls are still affected by online harassment; and yet there has not been much in the way of studies of its emotional and even physical effects, not to mention the question of its causes, including sexism and misogyny. “I feel like it's understudied,” says Hinduja.

One reason for this lack of attention may be that the cyberbullying of girls is often dismissed as “normal” female behavior, due to the common perception that “girls are mean.” “When I give presentations [about cyberbullying] to parents, schools, and law enforcement,” says Justin Patchin, the other codirector of the CRC, “one reaction I often hear is ‘girls are mean,' as if that means there's nothing we can do about it. Well, adults are mean. I see more adults being mean than young people. We make pretty terrible role models when it comes to interacting online.”

Although many states have laws allowing for criminal prosecution of cyber-harassment, it has been difficult for victims to find any legal recourse, due to the problem of proving cause and effect in terms of harm, as well as the strength of the First Amendment and the fact that the legal system hasn't kept pace with new technology. In 2007, Missouri prosecutors declined to charge Lori Drew, finding that her behavior did not violate any laws, behavior which included engaging Megan Meier in online conversations that “became sexual for a 13-year-old.” Prosecutors explained that this was in part because the state's harassment laws didn't cover Internet activity. (Drew was later convicted of three computer fraud misdemeanors, but in 2009 a federal judge overturned all three guilty verdicts.) In 2013, felony charges of aggravated stalking were dropped for the two girls who allegedly tormented Rebecca Sedwick after prosecutors found it difficult to make their case in the absence of evidence. Tricia Norman, Sedwick's mother, alleged to CNN that when the case made headlines, Rebecca's Ask.fm page, where she was allegedly harassed, was deleted from the site. (Ask.fm responded that it cooperates willingly with authorities.)

“The laws haven't caught up with use,” Hinduja says. “They're trying to shoehorn cyber cases with traditional laws, and it's not necessarily consistent with our ideas of justice. Tyler Clementi's roommate,” Dharun Ravi, “served twenty days of a thirty-day sentence.”

Clementi was the eighteen-year-old Rutgers University student who jumped to his death from the George Washington Bridge in 2010 after Ravi showed a friend a live webcam stream of a kiss Clementi shared with another young man in their dorm room. After his death, and that of Jamey Rodemeyer—a fourteen-year-old, openly gay boy from Buffalo, New York, who hanged himself in 2011 after being harassed online—President Barack Obama spoke out against cyberbullying. He released a video, “It Gets Better,” which has been one of the most watched and most heralded videos of his presidency. “Like all of you,” the president said, “I was shocked and saddened by the deaths of several young people who were bullied and taunted for being gay and who ultimately took their own lives. As a parent of two daughters, it breaks my heart, and it's something that shouldn't happen in this country.” The president never directly addressed the cyberbullying of girls.

On another day at the Town Center mall, three friends had stopped at a Starbucks to have sweet coffee drinks. They were sitting at the same table but not talking to one another. They were staring at their phones, thumbing, scrolling, tapping. When I remarked on the picture they made, all together, but not together, they laughed.

“I know, it's terrible,” Carrie said. “I always feel like I have to check my phone. It's like I have to deal with responding to all these things and see who's saying what.”

“You don't want to miss out,” said Kayla.

“I check on what everyone is doing,” Dara said. “You see who sent you Snapchats and find out what's happening.”

She showed me the last Snapchat Story she had viewed, where there was a picture of a girl wearing a funny face and eating a plate of bacon. “Bacon,” said the caption over the photo. The girls all giggled.

“I know, it's kind of silly,” Dara said, “but if you don't show that you saw it, she'll be like, Why didn't you open my Story?”

“People's Instagram pictures,” Kayla remarked. “If you don't like or comment on them, someone can get offended and it can cause some drama.”

“So much drama,” said Carrie.

“It's ridiculous,” said Kayla.

The girls were fifteen and knew one another from school, where they were all in tenth grade. Carrie and Dara were white, and Kayla was black. They were wearing short shorts and tank tops and flip-flops. Carrie and Dara had long black hair, while Kayla had shoulder-length brown hair. They all had shiny black-and-white shopping bags from Sephora, the cosmetics chain, on the floor beside their chairs. Carrie's mother was a therapist and her father worked in real estate; Kayla's father was a business owner and her mother a school administrator; and Dara's parents were a doctor and a stay-at-home mom. Carrie's parents were divorced and the other girls' were still married.

“Sometimes I feel like I'm not just checking to see what people are saying about whatever—I'm making sure they're not saying anything about
me,
” Carrie said with a little laugh.

“And if they do, you have to respond, or it can cause complications,” said Kayla.

“So many complications,” said Dara. “It's like you spend half your time managing your reputation.”

“Social media can cause a lot of drama because of the way you can send it
around,
” Carrie said.

They talked about social media “drama” and how it usually began. Often, they said, it was when someone shared someone else's texts without the texter's knowledge, in order to show what was being said in a private conversation.

“That happens to everybody,” Dara said.

“And it makes it hard to trust,” said Kayla.

“I have terrible trust issues,” said Carrie. “Ever since middle school and everybody got their phones. I don't feel like I can trust anyone.”

“Certain people will even record someone talking on their phone and let other people hear the recording,” Dara said.

“Oh, yeah,” said Kayla, “that's a bad one.”

“Once you press send, it's over,” Carrie said. “Whatever you say over text, people can screenshot it and send it to anyone—that's happened to me a lot.”

“And you feel betrayed,” said Dara.

“Over and over,” said Carrie.

They said there were other ways kids “betrayed” one another and did things that were “mean,” such as unliking posts and pictures or blocking.

“It's ridiculous how you'll have some little misunderstanding with a girl,” Kayla said, “and then she'll go on all your accounts and unlike everything she ever liked of yours.”

“My little sister who's in middle school is doing finstas,” Carrie said. The other girls smiled. “Finstas” were fake Instagram accounts that didn't show the user's real name. “They make them so the parents can't see what they're doing on social media,” Carrie explained. “Especially if it's like sixth-grade girls posting pictures in their bras. Or like they use them to talk crap about each other.”

“The posts are really dramatic,” Kayla said. “Girls will be like, Did you
see
that finsta post? Oh my
God,
I can't believe what she
said.
”

They laughed.

“But I feel like we do that, too,” meaning in the higher grades, said Carrie. “I feel like people will say mean things on social media they wouldn't say in person.”

According to studies, she's right. A 2013 review of studies on cyberbullying in the
Universal Journal of Educational Research
reported that “perceived anonymity online and the safety and security of being behind a computer screen aid in freeing individuals from traditionally constraining pressures of society, conscience, morality, and ethics to behave in a normative manner.” In other words, digital communication seems to relieve people of their conscience, enabling them to feel more comfortable behaving unethically. It's a startling conclusion, however obvious it already may be to anyone who has witnessed examples of it online, from the relatively minor rudeness you see in comments on the average Facebook feed to the viciousness of Gamergate—the online harassment campaign waged against women in the video game industry and the cultural critic Anita Sarkeesian in 2014. Threats made against the women included doxing, or the exposure of personal information on the Internet, as well as rape and death threats. Gamergate supporters were largely anonymous.

And yet despite evidence of how the anonymity of social media can contribute to antisocial behavior, anonymous apps such as Whisper, Secret, Yik Yak, and Sneeky have multiplied in recent years, as has the debate over their ethical standing. On Twitter in 2014, Netscape cofounder and Silicon Valley venture capitalist Marc Andreessen criticized anonymous apps—also known as “bullying apps”—as well as their investors for failing to take responsibility for their negative impact. “As designers, investors, commentators,” Andreessen wrote in a series of twelve tweets, “we need to seriously ask ourselves whether some of these systems are legitimate and worthy…not from an investment return point of view, but from an ethical and moral point of view.” While individual social networking sites have responded with increased monitoring of users' posts and comments, often when under fire for some story in the news involving abusive behavior online, there's been no general reckoning in Silicon Valley about the ways in which its products may be encouraging unethical and harmful behavior. The First Amendment has become the blanket behind which social media companies seem to hide from any questions regarding the online speech and activities of their users.

“There's no such thing as rules” on social media, said Dara.

The girls confessed that they sometimes found themselves engaging in the same online behaviors that had angered or hurt them in the past.

“I've screenshotted someone and showed the texts,” Carrie admitted. “I know I shouldn't, but when you're upset about something someone said and you want to show it to someone else, you just do it. I've said things on text I really regret,” she went on, “and then I'm not friends with that person anymore. And then I see them at school and it's so awkward because we never actually talked about it face-to-face.”

“Friends have a fight on Facebook and it's like a thing that happened but it didn't really happen,” said Kayla.

“I feel like saying things over social media is so much easier,” Dara said. “But if you say something on Facebook, it hurts the same amount as if the person said it to your face; but that person doesn't think about that because they're just typing it on a computer.”

Studies have found that the winnowing away of face-to-face communication in the digital age may be having an effect on the ability of kids to interact in person. A 2014 study at UCLA found that sixth-graders who went just five days without looking at a smartphone, television, or other screen were significantly better at reading human emotions in face-to-face communication than sixth-graders from the same school who continued using their electronic devices. “Kids are spending so much time communicating through technology, they're not developing basic communication skills that humans have used since forever,” says psychologist Jim Taylor, author of
Raising Generation Tech: Preparing Your Children for a Media-Fueled World.
“Communication is not just about words. It's about body language, tone of voice, facial expressions, even pheromones, all of which can't be conveyed through social media. Emoticons are very weak substitutes.”

And when nonverbal cues are stripped away, it can limit the potential for understanding, arguably the foundation of empathy. When researchers at the University of Michigan reviewed data from seventy-two studies conducted between 1979 and 2009, all focused on monitoring levels of empathy among American college students, they found that students today were scoring about 40 percent lower than their earlier counterparts.

It's something that comes to mind when hearing about “The New Intolerance of Student Activism,” as
The Atlantic
described it in a headline in 2015. The article reported on a perceived breakdown of civility among college activists, focusing on a case at Yale in that year in which students demanded the resignation of the master of Silliman College (a residential dorm at Yale), Nicholas Christakis, and his wife, Erika, a lecturer in early childhood education. Erika had written an e-mail encouraging students to consider one another's right to freedom of speech in selecting Halloween costumes, even if it meant tolerating costumes they found offensive.

“Hundreds of Yale students are attacking [the Christakises],”
The Atlantic
reported, “some with hateful insults, shouted epithets, and a campaign of public shaming.” In a video of a protest in the courtyard of Silliman, it's striking to hear some of the students addressing Nicholas Christakis with the very same insults one sees online when fights erupt on Facebook and other social media platforms. “You are disgusting!…Be quiet!” one young woman shouts at him, as if he is another social media user who can be bullied offline. “You should step down!” she demands, when Christakis doesn't agree with her. “Walk away,” another student says, encouraging his fellow students to leave the conversation.

Whatever you think of the students' position on Halloween costumes (and I see their point; insulting Halloween costumes are to be despised), their refusal to engage in dialogue with Christakis is troubling, as is their readiness to attack him when he does seem to be trying to talk to them respectfully. Another young woman at the protest, demanding an apology from Christakis, says, “Are you going to [apologize] or not? 'Cause I can just leave if you're not going to say that.” Leave, or log off, or block?

When talking about the rise of “social justice warriors”—the term for the aggressively outraged and rigid type of young activists seen both on- and offline—articles have mentioned as possible influences narcissistic parenting and the increase in narcissism among the young, as well as the fragmenting of discourse allegedly caused by identity politics. A more consistent picture emerges when you consider that this is the first generation of college students to grow up with smartphones and twenty-four/seven access to social media; this is a generation unlike any other before in how it has learned to communicate from behind screens, where the majority have either experienced cyberbullying or witnessed the cyberbullying of their peers. (Almost 90 percent of teens have seen cyberbullying on social media, according to the Pew Research Center in 2011.)

It's unfortunate that the phrase “social justice” has become entangled with “social justice warrior,” as social justice is certainly an unmitigated good, something to strive for, and something social justice warriors seem to want to strive for themselves. Some of their methods, however, seem to resemble bullying. In the wake of the Halloween costume controversy, in December 2015, Erika Christakis resigned from her teaching position at Yale; the administration said that she had been a “well-regarded instructor.”

The Boca girls all said that they felt kids were “meaner” online than they were in person, and that they themselves had been meaner on social media than they would be if they were talking to someone face-to-face. They said that they, too, had blocked and unfollowed people, gossiped about people, and deliberately not followed or friended someone back in order to send a message that they didn't like that person or were upset with something she had done. According to Pew in 2013, “Unfriending and blocking are equally common among teens of all ages and across all socioeconomic groups.”

“Like, I'll follow someone on Instagram, and if they don't follow me back I'll immediately think that person is mean or doesn't like me,” Carrie said. “So when I don't follow someone back, I know they're going to probably think that same thing about me…But then why do I do it?”

“Because it's on your phone, so it doesn't seem real,” said Kayla. “But it is real, in a kind of way.”

“You assume so many things about people on social media without really knowing the truth of the situation and it makes you think crazy things based on the wrong information,” Carrie said.

“I would rather
not
know as many things about people as you know from social media,” said Dara. “You watch people and see their insecurities and you find out too much information and you compare yourself to them. It makes me more judgey, I guess.”

They all said that they had ignored someone's texts—“oh, yes!”—even when they suspected it would “make them mad.” “How long it takes to respond is who has the power,” Kayla said wryly.

They said that they had also posted pictures they knew would make someone jealous or upset. “Like if you're mad at somebody and there's some guy you know she likes, you'll post a picture of yourself with him, just hanging out or whatever, 'cause you know she'll see it and get upset,” said Carrie.