Though it took five years to get it off the ground, the American Association of University Women has launched a nationwide, year-long campaign to get teenage girls together to discuss and solve their problems.
The first of 40 Sister-to-Sister Summits was held Nov. 15 in Philadelphia, bringing together girls from 12 to 16 to discuss things that give them trouble in school and try to come up with answers. Without adult “help.” Student leaders will take their action plans back to their schools to seek real change.
Alexis Harper, 16, didn’t hesitate when she was asked to be a facilitator. “I thought I could give some of the girls advice,” explained the 11th grade student at Philadelphia’s George Washington Carver Engineering and Science School. “I thought I could help the younger people coming up.”
As facilitator, Harper headed one of the summit chat rooms, where a group of a dozen girls discussed issues they chose as most important. In Harper’s chat room, the topic was violence in the schools. Other topics discussed included body image and teen pregnancy.
“I did include some ice-breaking time: `Tell me about yourself, the things you like to do,’ and that was good, because right off, we could see we had things in common. Then we got down to the issue. All the girls in my group were from different backgrounds, so some were not even familiar with violence. For others–more than half–violence was a way of life.
“For them, words aren’t even used. You even look at one of those girls wrong, and they’ll be ready to fight.”
For 90 minutes, the students in Harper’s group described the kinds of incidents that provoke violence and tried to imagine alternatives to fighting.
“Pettiness and jealousy seem to be at the root of all the fighting,” Harper said. “We talked about ways to turn the other cheek, to be the bigger person and step down.”
For most of the girls, this made sense. Controversy arose, though, when the participants described situations where they used violence in self-defense.
“We got into quite an argument about that,” said Harper, who offered the suggestion of finding an adult to intervene. The exchanges were spirited but never got out of hand.
“I liked the fact that we got into these heated topics, but I had also laid down rules for my group,” Harper said. “The first rule was to be respectful; if someone else is talking, don’t talk. In my chat room, it was like the Golden Rule.”
At the end of the day, all the summit participants gathered in an auditorium. One by one, representatives from each chat room went to the microphone and presented a summary of the issues they had discussed, as well as recommendations for addressing them.
For Harper, the power was in the shared experiences.
“Some girls, their whole viewpoint is completely different,” she said. “This helped us step away from our own lives and see things differently.”
“Plans for these summits have been in the works for a long time,” said AAUW President Sandra Bernard, who attended the Philadelphia session. “We did a report in 1992 which documented the importance of creating an environment in which girls could share their experiences, explore their problems and brainstorm for solutions.”
Research in that report, “How Schools Shortchange Girls,” showed the issues often confronted by teenage girls are not generally addressed as part of the school curriculum. Further, it showed that problems such as teen pregnancy, drug abuse, gangs and a preoccupation with physical appearance can have a direct impact on girls’ learning.
This report followed on the heels of AAUW’s 1991 “Shortchanging Girls, Shortchanging America,” which concluded that young women often face a dramatic drop in self-esteem and lose their strong, confident voices when they enter adolescence. The report also showed a correlation between low educational achievement and dysfunction. For example, girls who are doing badly in school are five times more likely than other students to become teen parents.
Despite the findings in this report, schools often fail to address the issues of primary concern to female students, Bernard said. These summits were created to address that failing.
“These summits will create an environment where young girls can talk freely,” Bernard said. “Once they’ve identified the problems they face, they can then brainstorm for solutions.”
Well before the Nov. 15 summit date, fliers were placed in all Philadelphia junior and senior high schools announcing the event and seeking student participants.
Quentina Judon, 16 and an 11th-grade student at George Washington Carver Engineering and Science School, signed up to be on the planning committee.
“I did it because I’m always doing things of this nature,” said Judon. “It’s very seldom that girls get a chance to get together and talk about how they feel and what they can do to make things better for them, so I jumped at the activity.”
In all, about 80 girls signed up to participate in the day-long event. At the time they signed up, they also picked the issues they considered most important.
To maintain an atmosphere where participants could speak freely, the AAUW barred adults and the press from the workshops and allowed them to attend only the press conference at the end of the day, in which group participants filed to the podium and shared summaries of their workshop discussions.
“Being skinny is not all that,” a representative of one of the body-image groups told the cheering crowd. “If you have a good self-image, looks won’t matter to you.” Her group recommended a Sister-to-Sister newsletter to carry on the day’s dialogue. They also suggested that schools add nutrition and self-esteem classes for girls.
“Tell teens how it is for real,” said the representative from the group on teen pregnancy. “Most teens don’t realize if we have sex, we’re at risk for other sexually transmitted diseases, not just AIDS.”
Another group on the same topic stressed the importance of standing up for yourself and not being swayed by pressure. “Don’t be fooled by a lot of sweet talk,” one girl said.
Two prevalent themes in all the workshops included enhancing self-esteem and getting parents more involved in issues critical to teens. In fact, Judon would like to see another summit in which parents could be involved with their children.
“When people came to drop their children off, parents could feel the excitement in the air. A lot of them wanted to stay, but we didn’t allow that. Maybe we could plan to have a summit specifically for mother-daughter issues and another one for father-son issues. A lot of families need that because they have such a lack of communication.”
But Harper was glad there weren’t adults in the chat rooms.
“As a teenager, I don’t really respond to peers if an adult is in the room,” she said. “When it’s all teenagers, you respond better, you talk more freely because you know you will not be ridiculed.”
As far as boys attending future summits, Judon was enthusiastic, but Harper expressed ambivalence. “Sometimes when guys come around, the girls change their answers and they don’t act like themselves. On the other hand, it would be nice to see the other side of the issues, to see how guys feel. It can be so different.”
As these summits are held in various cities, organizers plan to take the written reports from each and translate the students’ suggestions into a clear platform of action. This will then be disseminated to schools, parents and other community action groups like the Girl Scouts and Big Brothers/Big Sisters.
Bernard also said the program could be modified and honed, based on previous workshops. One possibility, she said, might be narrowing the age range.
Workshop sites and dates for other states, including Illinois, are posted on the AAUW Web site (www.aauw.org/).
