Dr. Spears - Oh, How I Need You...for my film.

Below is a media release (click on above title to go to the source) about Dr. Barbara Spears...who I would very much like to find a way to interview for my film. Ive got some ideas on how I might accomplish this. #1 being that I have two doc exchange students that will be in Australia as of late summer and Im thinking about asking them to perform the interview in my absence. Stay tuned on this one!

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GIRLS TREAD A FINE LINE BETWEEN FRIENDSHIP AND BULLYING

Girls’ peer relationships often tread a fine line between protective and aggressive or bullying behaviours when it comes to preserving friendships, a University of South Australia study shows.

Friendships and peer relations are very important to girls and many have the social intelligence to manipulate and use these friendships to their own advantage, sometimes using unfriendly and excluding behaviours, according to Dr Barbara Spears from UniSA’s School of Education.

Dr Spears has been undertaking research to explore girls’ understanding of their friendships and peer relationships, and the tension between the friendship and aggressive and bullying behaviours.

Almost 1000 middle school girls in years 6 to 9 from five single sex and two co-educational schools in metropolitan Adelaide participated in the study.

“In both school settings girls have a very idealised view of friendship, with positive elements such as acceptance, caring, sharing, loyalty, trust, honesty and kindness. These positive aspects bond the relationship, and sharing secrets and disclosing personal details are the cement that holds the friendship together.

“Girls also have a clear boundary about what friends don’t do – they don’t tell secrets, talk about someone behind their back, attack someone verbally, steal someone’s friend or take someone’s boyfriend,” Dr Spears said.

“When building friendships and consolidating them, girls often use behaviours that protect and preserve their friendship, like shutting others out who might be considered a threat to their friendship. But when a friendship falls over, information that was exclusively and intimately shared in the sanctity of the friendship often becomes the weapon that girls use against the former friend. They attack each other verbally, targeting their reputations and use the peer group to support their action. When the intent to harm the other girl comes into play, girls see it as bullying.

“While bullying is repeated and ongoing across all ages, the older girls are more aware that power is an aspect of bullying and they know how to use it.

“Girls understand very clearly that direct aggression is bullying but when it comes to indirect aggression, definitions and opinions are divided,” Dr Spears said.

“While 85 per cent of the girls said that getting others to gang up on someone was bullying, only 56 per cent said that shutting someone out of a group was bullying. Even more surprising, only 42 per cent of the girls thought that telling someone not to speak to a particular girl (deliberately excluding) was a bullying behaviour.

“When challenging their views on exclusion, the girls say they are only joking, and from their point of view they may be, but they are not considering the impact that their behaviour is having on the person who is being victimised,” Dr Spears said.

“Teachers should challenge that behaviour by asking the girls, ‘If you are only joking, who is laughing?’ and put the onus back on the girls to analyse what they are doing. These actions could shift attitudes and lead to change in the school group.

“The girls need to be taught skills in managing conflicts, that friendship is not ownership and conflict is a normal part of friendship. Ultimately, friendship and bullying are concerned with relationships, and so any solution must examine the interplay between the two.”

Friendship Research from Stanford

(click on above title for full article)
The Nature of Friendship

Friendship essentially involves a distinctive kind of concern for your friend, a concern which might reasonably be understood as a kind of love. Philosophers from the ancient Greeks on have traditionally distinguished three notions that can properly be called love: agape, eros, and philia. Agape is a kind of love that does not respond to the antecedent value of its object but instead is thought to create value in the beloved; it has come through the Christian tradition to mean the sort of love God has for us persons as well as, by extension, our love for God and our love for humankind in general. By contrast, eros and philia are generally understood to be responsive to the merits of their objects—to the beloved's properties, especially his goodness or beauty. The difference is that eros is a kind of passionate desire for an object, typically sexual in nature, whereas ‘philia’ originally meant a kind of affectionate regard or friendly feeling towards not just one's friends but also possibly towards family members, business partners, and one's country at large (Liddell et al., 1940; Cooper, 1977a). Given this classification of kinds of love, philia seems to be that which is most clearly relevant to friendship (though just what philia amounts to needs to be clarified in more detail).

For this reason, love and friendship often get lumped together as a single topic; nonetheless, there are significant differences between them. As understood here, love is an evaluative attitude directed at particular persons as such, an attitude which we might take towards someone whether or not that love is reciprocated and whether or not we have an established relationship with her.[1] Friendship, by contrast, is essentially a kind of relationship grounded in a particular kind of special concern each has for the other as the person she is; and whereas we must make conceptual room for the idea of unrequited love, unrequited friendship is senseless. Consequently, accounts of friendship tend to understand it not merely as a case of reciprocal love of some form (together with mutual acknowledgment of this love), but as essentially involving significant interactions between the friends—as being in this sense a certain kind of relationship.

Nonetheless, questions can be raised about precisely how to distinguish romantic relationships, grounded in eros, from relationships of friendship, grounded in philia, insofar as each involves significant interactions between the involved parties that stem from a kind of reciprocal love that is responsive to merit. Clearly the two differ insofar as romantic love normally has a kind of sexual involvement that friendship lacks; yet, as Thomas (1989) asks, is that enough to explain the real differences between them? Badhwar (2003, 65–66) seems to think so, claiming that the sexual involvement enters into romantic love in part through a passion and yearning for physical union, whereas friendship involves instead a desire for a more psychological identification. Yet it is not clear exactly how to understand this: precisely what kind of “psychological identification” or intimacy is characteristic of friendship? (For further discussion, see Section 1.2.)

In philosophical discussions of friendship, it is common to follow Aristotle (Nicomachean Ethics, Book VIII) in distinguishing three kinds of friendship: friendships of pleasure, of utility, and of virtue. Although it is a bit unclear how to understand these distinctions, the basic idea seems to be that pleasure, utility, and virtue are the reasons we have in these various kinds of relationships for loving our friend. That is, I may love my friend because of the pleasure I get out of her, or because of the ways in which she is useful to me, or because I find her to have a virtuous character. Given the involvement of love in each case, all three kinds of friendship seem to involve a concern for your friend for his sake and not for your own.

There is an apparent tension here between the idea that friendship essentially involves being concerned for your friend for his sake and the idea of pleasure and utility friendships: how can you be concerned for him for his sake if you do that only because of the pleasure or utility you get out of it? If you benefit your friend because, ultimately, of the benefits you receive, it would seem that you do not properly love your friend for his sake, and so your relationship is not fully one of friendship after all. So it looks like pleasure and utility friendships are at best deficient modes of friendship; by contrast, virtue friendships, because they are motivated by the excellences of your friend's character, are genuine, non-deficient friendships. For this reason, most contemporary accounts, by focusing their attention on the non-deficient forms of friendship, ignore pleasure and utility friendships.[2]

As mentioned in the first paragraph of this section, philia seems to be the kind of concern for other persons that is most relevant to friendship, and the word, ‘philia,’ sometimes gets translated as friendship; yet philia is in some ways importantly different from what we ordinarily think of as friendship. Thus, ‘philia’ extends not just to friends but also to family members, business associates, and one's country at large. Contemporary accounts of friendship differ on whether family members, in particular one's children before they become adults, can be friends. Most philosophers think not, understanding friendship to be essentially a relationship among equals; yet some philosophers (such as Friedman 1989; Rorty 1986/1993; Badhwar 1987) explicitly intend their accounts of friendship to include parent-child relationships, perhaps through the influence of the historical notion of philia. Nonetheless, there do seem to be significant differences between, on the one hand, parental love and the relationships it generates and, on the other hand, the love of one's friends and the relationships it generates; the focus here will be on friendship more narrowly construed.

In philosophical accounts of friendship, several themes recur consistently, although various accounts differ in precisely how they spell these out. These themes are: mutual caring (or love), intimacy, and shared activity; these will be considered in turn.

How Nice To Santa Would A Girl Have to Be?

(This article was from Dec 07, but Ive only come across it just now. Always nice to come across research that's useful to the film and also screws Walmart at the same time. )

Suggestive pink Santa panties targeting young girls are being removed from Wal-Mart stores after parents objected to the offensive undergarments.

The panties, which were sold in the juniors department, seemed to suggest that girls don't need money, they just need a sugar daddy — in this case Santa Claus.

The hipster briefs — carrying the slogan "Who needs credit cards ..." on the front and "When you have Santa" on the derriere — caused an uproar among parents, who called for the $2.96 drawers to be pulled off the racks.

"We have directed our stores to remove this merchandise from our shelves," Linda Brown Blakely, a spokeswoman for Wal-Mart, told FOXNews.com Wednesday.

The undergarments had caused a stir on some blogs prior to Wednesday's announcement. Scarlett, a reader of Feministing.com, alerted the blog to the holiday-inspired undies, which she found on a rack in the juniors department of a Wal-Mart in Cary, N.C.

"There's nothing quite like telling adolescent girls that they don't need to worry about finances since they have their very own moneypot between their legs," Jessica Valenti, the executive editor of Feministing.com, wrote on the panty blog post.

Scarlett was so incensed by the message on the front of the panties, she didn't even see the Santa kicker in the rear, she wrote on the blog.

"I still think that the entire thing is messed up. This isn't just a cute T-shirt that says 'Just ask Santa,'" she wrote. "This is a pair of panties. Exactly how nice to Santa would the girl have to be in order to get stuff?"

Growing Up Too Fast Article from Wall Street Journal

Kids Today Are Growing Up Way Too Fast
Wednesday, October 28, 1998
By Kay S. Hymowitz

Marketers call them "tweens": kids between eight and 12, midway between childhood and adolescence. But tweens are becoming more like teens, leaning more and more toward teen styles, teen attitudes and teen behavior at its most troubling.

"The 12- to 14-year-olds of yesterday are the 10- to 12-'s of today," says Bruce Friend, a vice president of the kids' cable channel Nickelodeon. The Nickelodeon-Yankelovicht Youth Monitor found that by the time they are 12, children describe themselves as "flirtatious, sexy, trendy, athletic, cool." Among the products targeted at this age group is the Sweet Georgia Brown line from AM Cosmetics. It includes body paints and scented body oils with names like Vanilla Vibe and Follow Me Boy. Soon, thanks to the Cincinnati design firm Libby Peszyk Kattiman, your little darling will be able to slip into some tween-sized bikini panties.

The tweening of childhood is more than just a matter of fashion. Tweens are demonstrating many of the deviant behaviors we usually associate with adolescence. "Ninth and 10th grade used to be the starting point for a lot of what we call risk behaviors," says Henry Trevor, who heads a middle school in Brooklyn, N.Y. "Fifteen years ago they moved into the eighth grade. Now it's seventh grade."

The data supporting this trend are sketchy, since most studies of risk behavior begin with 15-year-olds. But the clearest evidence is found in crime statistics. Although children under 15 still represent a minority of juvenile arrests, their numbers have grown disproportionately in the past 20 years. According to a report by the office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, "offenders under age 15 represent the leading edge of the juvenile crime problem, and their numbers are growing." The crimes committed by younger teens and preteens are growing in severity, too: "Person offenses, which once constituted 16 percent of the total court cases for this age group now constitute 25 percent."

Tweens are also becoming more sexually active. Between 1988 and 1995, the proportion of girls saying they had sexual intercourse before 15 rose to 19% from 11%. (Boys remained stable at 21%.) "We're beginning to see a few pregnant sixth-graders, "says Christy Hogan, a recently retired middle-school counselor in Louisville, Ky.

Equally striking, though less easily tabulated, is the increasing prevalence of sexual contact short of intercourse. Michael Thompson, co-author of the forthcoming "Raising Cain: Protecting the Emotional Life of Boys," says he hears from seventh- and eighth- graders a lot of talk about oral sex, which they, like a certain prominent role model, don't think of as sex. "For them, it's just fooling around," Mr. Thompson says.

Drugs and alcohol are also seeping into tween culture. The past decade has seen more than a doubling of the proportion of eighth-graders who have smoked marijuana (10% today) and of those who no longer see it as dangerous. "The stigma isn't there the way it was 10 years ago," says Dan Kindlon, Mr. Thompson's co-author. "Then, it was the fringe group smoking pot.... Now the fringe group is using LSD. "

Other troubling trends: Although the numbers remain small, suicide among tweens more than doubled between 1979 and 1995. Therapists say they are seeing a growth in eating disorders — anorexia and obsessive dieting—even among girls in late elementary school, doubtless an outgrowth of a premature fashion-consciousness.

What change in our social ecology has led to the emergence of tweens? In my conversations with educators and child psychologists who work primarily with middle-class kids nationwide, two major and fairly predictable themes emerged: absentee parents and a sexualized and glitzy media-driven marketplace. What has been less commonly recognized is the way these two influences combine to augment the authority of the peer group.

With their parents working long hours away from home, many youngsters are leaving for school from an empty house after eating breakfast alone, then picking up fast food or frozen meals for dinner. Almost without exception, the principals and teachers I spoke with describe a pervasive loneliness among tweens. "The most common complaint I hear," says Ms. Hogan, "is, 'My mom doesn't care what I do. She's never home. She doesn't even know what I do.' "

The loss of family life invariably expands the power of the peer group. By late elementary school, according to "Peer Power: Culture and Identity," a recent study by Patricia Adler with Peter Adler, boys understand that their popularity depends on "toughness, troublemaking, domination, coolness, and interpersonal bragging and sparring skills." Girls derive status from "success at grooming, clothes, and other appearance-related variables; . . . [their] romantic success as measured through popularity and going with boys; affluence and its correlates of material possessions and leisure pursuits."

Both parental absence and the powerful peer group are intricately connected to the rise of a burgeoning tween market. Tweens began to catch the eye of marketers around the mid-1980s, when research found that more and more children this age were shopping for their own clothes, shoes, accessories, drugstore items—even for the family groceries. Today's tween ads reflect this sensibility: Kids are on their own, goes the premise; flatter them as hip and aware almost-teens rather than out-of-it little kids—as independent, sophisticated consumers with their own language, music and fashion.

Anyone who remembers high school will recall many of these dynamics. But it is important to recognize that the combination of isolation from adults, peer cruelty and fantasies of sophistication, though always a danger to the alienated teenager, is especially taxing to the fragile ego of the preadolescent. With less life experience and less self-awareness, preadolescents have fewer internal resources to fall back on. "These kids have two years less time to become a firm person," says Helen Colvin, a middle-school science teacher from Harrisburg, Pa. "That's two years less time to discover what they are, what they believe, to experiment with identity. Instead, they want to be like their friends."

Tweens, far from being simply a marketing niche group, are the vanguard of a new, decultured generation, isolated from family and neighborhood, shrugged at by parents, dominated by peers, and delivered into the hands of a sexualized and status- and fad-crazed marketplace.