Girls are nasty. It starts around the age of eight. They form little cliques and always pick on one or two. They often bully. As they get older, their cliques expand. They form cabals. They are more than capable of making the lives of others girls miserable. Lonely. I know. I was once a girl. I am the mother of girls and granddaughters. Nothing has changed.
Except our response. Today, a girl is taught to run to the teacher if someone says or does something mean or nasty. The teacher will fix it. Instead of providing our girls-and boys-with skills to defend themselves against the little bullies and their little meanness, we are raising children incapable of defending themselves; of living in the real world not the one that idealists think we have.
This brings me to the debacle at Dalhousie University Dentistry School. Young women were appalled, appalled at the comments on a Facebook page out up by their fellow students- really-fellow students. Young men behaving like stupid little boys. They put comments up on their FB page that in previous generations they would have shared over too many drinks at the pub.
I don’t understand the shock. Young people have grown up addicted to social media. They share everything. EVERYTHING. I am amazed by the information young people share. Every thought, every act, every move they make. Selfies-with little or no clothing out on display for all to see. Sexting. No inhibitions And lo and behold a bunch of stupid twenty- somethings refer to among other things, sick comments made on Facebook by forty-something CBC radio host, Jian Ghomeshi. And the women were terrified. Fear overcame them. What to do? What to do?
Should they confront their fellow students give them a piece of their mind, and say-“how stupid and infantile can you be?” Did they? No, they ran to their substitute mommy -the head of the school. Sharing their unease, their fear for their safety.
"We work with them every day; we've worked with them for four years. We just need someone who's impartial to maybe help us get through this, or figure it out." (CBC)
They are afraid. Of what exactly? Words? These are young adults. School mates. Working side by side for years. Working in the dental clinic side by side. And they cannot think of anything else to do but run to mommy? The problem seems to be how will these young ladies ever feel comfortable in clinic with them?
One of the girl’s fathers said "I think, as I said, that procedural fairness has to not have a knee-jerk reaction to this, but something has to be done because school starts again in two weeks and the female students are going to be back in the clinic with the male perpetrators and that is not going to be a healthy learning environment."
The province even jumped in. Nova Scotia Health Minister Leo Glavine is prepared to block students from getting a licence to practice.
So the young men, the 13-member Class of DDS 2015 Gentlemen group, who are in their last year of dentistry-supported by the way by taxpayers- are being threatened with expulsion. Their lives ruined because they wrote dumb, stupid juvenile boy stuff. The media referred to some of it as joking around.
Have any of these young men made physical threats against these china doll, ever so fragile young women? Have they ever threatened any woman at the college? Have they acted as boorishly as they write?
The university is concerned about the atmosphere at the college because of the things these young men wrote. They are going to put into place a way to reconcile everyone. So many feelings have been hurt. Can’t have that. As if anything they do will change the way the minds of young men work. As if talking to these young men today will change the thoughts of the young men in future generations. I guess they don’t know that young men think about sex every 7 seconds or so. OK, the default position. Mind wanders-sex enters.
Nothing has changed-except perhaps we now acknowledge the boorishness and stupidity of boys and young men; let’s just say it-all men! And women have agreed we won’t sit back quietly and take it. But instead of empowering our young women to stand up and call them on their stupidity-their words here not actions- and most probably embarrass them, we have in the 21st century taught them to run for help and tattle.
Restorative Justice
These actions-writing words-of these young men are so serious that the school is going to initiate Restorative Justice. Restorative Justice-the system set in place to help those traumatized by the war in Rwanda where ethnic cleansing and genocide took place, machete attacks-in front of loved ones. This is the system that the university has decided is necessary to treat the “trauma” of the young women, trauma from reading dumb stupid juvenile boyish comments by twenty somethings. The trauma these young women endured is on par with Rwanda? How about Cambodia and the Killing Fields? Maybe South Africa? Or the trauma experienced by the Yazidis and the Syrian Christians? Is their trauma in that level?
If yes, then we have serious problem in this country- not with the concept of sexual assault-but the fragility of our women unable to fend for themselves against nasty comments-despite the fact that so many of these young women grew up giving and/or receiving some mighty nasty comments from their own gender. And if they have not been as traumatized as these other people, why is Restorative Justice being employed?
As a woman, I am disgusted with the events at Dalhousie. Not so much with the men-stupid as they are-but the response. I am disgusted by the women and administration for making this into such a serious event. The people truly harmed by these actions are the patients from the dental clinic that was closed in order to spare patients from…from what, exactly? These are people who are thrilled to be able to be cared for by the dental students because they can’t afford dental care. I wonder what a parent with a child suffering from a toothache would say.
In the grand scheme of things, these women who want to be respected in the world and play with the grown-ups showed themselves to be wusses. As did the leadership of the university. And for those who protested that the men should be expelled; get a life. Open your eyes to the real world –to trauma, to terror, to real attacks against women. And save Restorative Justice for those truly in need.
Diane Weber Bederman is a blogger for ‘Times of Israel’, a contributor to Convivium, a national magazine about faith in our community, and also writes about family issues and mental illness. She is a multi-faith endorsed hospital trained chaplain.
