Climbing Toward Confidence

“When ’dating’ came at me, I dropped ’school’.” “I got hit in the head with ’drugs’ because I wasn’t looking.” “It was so overwhelming to have all the balls going at once I didn’t know what to do.” It’s a wintry afternoon in February. Roughly twenty teen girls and adult women are gathered in the cavernous space of ClimbMax Indoor Climbing Center in downtown Asheville. They are participants in the spring session of Climbing Toward Confidence, a new program of Our VOICE (Buncombe County’s rape crisis center). When asked to identify the biggest challenges in their lives, the teen girls respond: Dating. Drugs. Pregnancy. Sex. Fitting in. School. Family. Body image. The future. Each of these responses is written onto a small throw-able object, and the group is asked to literally juggle all the challenges in their lives. For practice, the group passes just one ball back and forth across the circle School. “Hey, Kim, here’s ’School’.” “Thanks, Lyric. Hey, Jacque, here’s ’School’.” They make eye contact and no one drops the ball. In the next round, the various challenges are introduced one by one. A rubber frog comes winging its way across the circle “Sex”. “Family” is an oversized, hard-to-catch ball. Soon, all politeness and eye contact have disappeared. Objects are tossed to and fro chaotically whizzing past the girl they were intended for, or hitting someone else by mistake. The group erupts in shouts and laughter. “So, what do you think that activity was about?” Everyone is quiet and still now the objects lay scattered around on the floor. “I think it shows you what happens in life,” one girl answers. “When you’re a kid, you just have one or two things to worry about. As you get older, there’s a lot more coming at you.” Another young woman speaks up. “When all the balls started flying, we stopped being nice to each other. I stopped caring about whether the next person was ready to catch ’Sex’ or ’Dating’ I just wanted to get rid of it. I hope I’d stick by my friends, but it seems really hard.” “I think it says you have a lot of choices in your life,” answers a third. “Either you’re the kind of person who follows others and gets distracted by all those things, or you’re a strong person who stays focused on what she wants.”

It is well-known among women that the early-teen years are some of the hardest for girls. Think back to when you were twelve or thirteen years old. Remember the insecurity, the confusion, the competition. The yearning to be something you were not; the intense desire to be accepted. Add in problems with family; the pressure of grades and the looming future; and the huge question mark of sexuality, relationships and dating. Adolescence has always been a complicated time, for all types of girls. The age-old challenges are accelerated for youth today by mass media that portray violence as sexy and sex as violent, that print sexualized images of increasingly younger girls, and that promote sex appeal over health, happiness or intellect. Research in girls’ development pinpoints twelve as a key pivotal age for girls the “edge of adolescence” (Gilligan) by which time girls have begun to step into the adult world. They’ve begun to read magazines, to pay attention to fashion, pop culture and the media, and to compare themselves to the images of women they see around them. Most will never live up to the expectations our society has for women expectations shaped by digital manipulations more often than by images of real women. Striving to fi t in, scared that they’ll be the next target of another girl’s malice, many young women learn to mute their voices, deny their intelligence, and compromise their individuality. We see this manifested in a girl who keeps her eyes downcast, who answers questions with, “I don’t know” and who doesn’t have the courage to disagree with others or say what she thinks. It leads to girls who think it’s impolite to refuse, who stay quiet because they don’t want to cause a problem, and who think their greatest value lies in their sex appeal to males. Low selfconfidence runs hand-in-hand with eating disorders, self-harming behaviors and depression. And often left unspoken, unaddressed, is one of the greatest threats of adolescence and early adulthood for females sexual assault.