By Jane F. Gilgun and Samantha Hirschey, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, USA

We wrote this series of blogs on girls’ aggression for child welfare social workers. The information is also useful to other service providers, educators, and parents. About three million cases of child abuse and neglect are reported each year, and one million cases are substantiated. These children have experienced complex trauma, which is a series of adversities that are so upsetting that they affect mood, attention, and emotional health and also threaten healthy social, emotional, and neurological development. Children with complex trauma, such as physical and verbal abuse in combination with loss and abandonments, are at risk to behave in aggressive ways. Child welfare social workers, therefore, routinely provide services to children and their families where the children have issues with aggression.

The goal of service to young people who have issues with aggression is to foster their self-compassion that in turn leads to compassion for others. The development of self-compassion arises through experiences of being treated with compassion. This means building relationships with young people. In this blog series, we recommend relational interviews, which are of means encouraging young people to talk about what is important to them. With the establishment of trust, reduction of aggression and increases in prosocial behaviors are possible.

African American young people are over-represented in child welfare caseloads and are also over-represented in cases of aggressive behaviors, suspensions, expulsions, and school dropouts. Child welfare social workers, therefore, negotiate complex issues related to race, ethnicity, gender, trauma, and school policies when they provide services to young clients who behave in aggressive ways.

How child welfare social workers respond to young people can influence the quality of their lives and the quality of the lives of others, such as other students, teachers, siblings, parents, and neighbors. If the aggression is not addressed effectively during the younger years, young people may grow into adults when their aggression may harm their children, other family members, and people in their neighborhoods and communities. Furthermore, there is a well-documented maltreatment to prison pipeline for boys as well as girls. The rates of abuse and neglect among young people in juvenile corrections and prisons are far higher than in the general population.

Child welfare social workers are positioned to affect policies and programs through direct work with young people and with school personnel. They can engage in relational interviews with parents and school staff in order to replace punitive polices with relational and restorative polices.

Purposes of the Blogs

Our purposes are to raise awareness of issues and interventions related to aggression in schools and other settings and to encourage child welfare social workers to take leadership in policies for young people who act out in aggressive ways. Far too often school policies and policies in other settings are punitive rather than restorative and silencing of students rather than inviting them into relationship through dialogue. We spotlight girls’ aggression because in national and understandable concerns for boys’ aggression, girls are often overlooked.

Our writing of this series of blogs is based on several goals, among them keeping everyone safe and the promotion the optimal development of young people. This includes targets, bystanders, and persons who act in aggressive ways. Our concern extends to the affects of aggression on school climate and the climate of other settings in which aggression occurs. In schools, aggression affects the safety of students and staff. It also affects learning and the capacities of young people to develop healthy peer relationships. Aggression has similar affects in other settings such as families, neighborhoods, and recreational facilities. Learning and optimal social development take place in settings where people feel safe.

In these blogs, we provide information to child welfare social workers that will guide them to take leadership that promotes the creation of conditions where young people who had been aggressive become prosocial in how they deal with situations that had previously provoked them to behave aggressively. Research shows that effective interventions are based upon relationships of trust. Without trust, interventions are ineffective.

We focus on girls because in recent years public officials have created policies and programs for boys, especially African Americans, while the issues that girls grapple with have received less attention. Concern for boys is understandable given the concern over police shootings of young black men and the well-documented rates of arrest and incarceration of black males. In the focus on males, however, girls have been overlooked despite similar rates of school dropouts and underperformance. In addition, teenage girls are subject to stereotyping that affects their behaviors and life chances such as teen pregnancy. One in four African American girls become pregnant as teens.

Racial stereotyping, expectations, and perceptions of young African American girls as aggressive underachievers are connected to their higher rates of suspensions and expulsions despite data that show they commit infractions at the same rate as other students. Melanie Horton, a 17-year old senior from Upper Darby, Pennsylvania, said, “Day-to-day things—you’re bossy, you’re aggressive, you’re not ladylike—all of us share that experience” (Anderson, 2015, n.p.).

The evidence is in: as a society, we are not responding well to issues that affect the quality of life of young African Americans.

A Program of Activities

In these blogs, we propose a program of activities designed to develop relationships based on trust and supportive communities that create conditions where girls feel respected and understood. In safe and affirming settings, girls and boys want to change their beliefs and behaviors and actually do. Relational interviews can foster supportive communities. Relational interviews are one-on-one or small group interviews whose purposes are to encourage persons to talk about what matters to them with the goal of developing relationships of trust. They are used routinely in community organizing in order to build grassroots coalitions that then work toward a common goal that typically involves changing social policy and practices.

When applied to work with young people who have issues with aggression, relational interviews can lead to the development of a community of support persons to whom young people can turn to in times of stress. For example, girls might seek to talk to trusted others when they think they are about to act in aggressive ways.

The final blogs in this series will show how relational interviews can lead to effective policies and interventions. We will show how relationship-based practice are foundations for group work and other interventions designed for girls with aggressive behaviors. One of the programs we recommend is restorative justice that focuses on the harm aggression does to relationships and on procedures for the repair of relationships.

We will also show how relational interviews can be used to bring about systems changes in schools whose policies are based on punishment, suspensions, and expulsions. The goal is to move schools to relationship-based policies so that young people who behave in aggressive ways will have structure and support that will help them to respond to troublesome situations in prosocial ways. This kind of behavioral change can only happen within supportive settings.

The following are the topics that this blog series covers.

  • Blog 1: Worthlessness and Self-Compassion
  • Blog 2: Girls’ Aggression: An Overview
  • Blog 3: Types of Aggression: Instrumental and Reactive
  • Blog 4: Types of Aggression: Non-Contact and Contact Aggression
  • Blog 5: Girls’ Relational Aggression: Targets of the Aggression
  • Blog 6: Relational Aggression: Girls who Perpetrate
  • Blog 7: Girls’ Aggression, Executive Function, and Self-Regulation
  • Blog 8: Antonia: A Case Study That Illustrates Executive Function and Self-Regulation
  • Blog 9: Differential Assessment
  • Blog 10: Relational Interviews and Relationship-Based Interventions
  • Blog 11: Group Work Based on Relationship-Based Practice
  • Blog 12: Relationship-Based Intervention Programs
  • Blog 13: Systems Change Through Relational Interviews

Much is at stake when young people behave in aggressive ways. We hope that this series of blogs contributes to an increased capacity for child welfare social workers to provide leadership in schools, families, and other settings where young people live their lives.

About the Authors

Jane F. Gilgun, Ph.D., LICSW, is a professor, School of Social Work, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, USA. She was a child welfare social worker for more than eight years and has taught courses and done qualitative research on high-risk children and families for many years. A special focus of her research is factors associated with good outcomes when children have experienced complex trauma. Professor Gilgun’s articles, books, and practice manuals are widely available on the internet. Many of them are free.

Samantha Hirschey is a second year master’s student at the School of Social Work, University of Minnesota, USA, and Professor Gilgun’s research assistant. She did her first year internship at the St. Paul Public Schools and her second internship will be at the Community-University Health Care Center that provides mental health services to residents of the inner city of Minneapolis. She has worked in a variety of social service agencies including with children, teens, and adults with mental illnesses and developmental disabilities. She has a special interest in the promotion of integrated behavioral health in children and families.

References

Anderson, Melinda D. (2015). Black girls should matter, too. The Atlantic, May 11. http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2015/05/black-girls-should-matter-too/392879/

Dupper, David R., Matthew T. Theriot, and Sarah W. Craun (2009). Reducing out of school suspensions: Practice guidelines for school social workers. Children & Schools, 31(1), 6-14.

Gilgun, Jane F. (2011). Jacinta’s lament: Happy father’s day, dad. Amazon.

Gonzalez, T. (2012). Keeping kids in schools: Restorative justice, punitive discipline, and the school to prison pipeline. Journal of Law and Education, 41(2), 281-235.

Gilbert, R., Widom, C. S., Browne, K., Fergusson, D., Webb, E. & Janson, S. (2009). Burden and consequences of child maltreatment in high-income countries. Lancet, 373(9657), 68–81.

Mullet, Judy Hostetler (2014). Restorative discipline: From getting even to getting well. Children & Schools, 36 (3), 157-162.

Ruch, Gillian (2005). Relationship practice and reflective practice: Holistic approaches to contemporary child care social work. Child and Family Social Work, 10, 111-123.

Ruch, Gillian, Danielle Turney and Adrian Ward (Eds.) (2010). Relationship-based social work: Getting to the heart of practice. London: Jessica Kingsley.

Teasley, Martell L. (2014) Shifting from zero tolerance to restorative justice in schools. Children and Schools 36 (3),131-133.