She Would Never Say That to Her Face – Jennifer Oaten
There is a sentence I have heard more than once this year. “She would never say that to her face.”
The “that” is usually something a girl has typed in a group chat, or sent in a direct message, or posted under a photo. It might be a comment about another girl’s body, a joke at someone’s expense, or a piece of information shared without permission. The girl who typed it is often kind, thoughtful and well-liked. She is not, in any other context, the kind of person who would walk up to a friend at lunch and say what she has just typed on her phone. And yet she did type it. And the friend read it. And, often, someone else screenshotted it.
Why the Screen Loosens Tongues
This is not a new observation. The internet has always loosened tongues. Adults do it too, in comment threads and reply-all emails and posts written at midnight. What is new, or at least newly urgent for the parents of teenage girls, is how completely friendship has moved into this space. The lunch table conversation has not disappeared, but it now runs in parallel with a second, faster, more permanent one happening on the phone in her pocket.
The psychologist John Suler named this shift more than two decades ago, calling it the online disinhibition effect. His point was simple. When we cannot see the other person’s face, when there is no voice catching, no eyes filling, no awkward silence telling us we have gone too far, we go further. The screen does not make us crueller. It removes the small, in-the-moment signals that ordinarily pull us back.
That is the part I want parents to sit with. The harm is not only what gets said. The harm is that the feedback loop, which teaches a young person how to be in friendship, the loop made of faces and voices and pauses, is being skipped.
What the Numbers Tell Us
This is not a fringe issue. The eSafety Commissioner’s most recent national survey of more than three thousand Australian children found that 40% of girls had been cyberbullied in the past 12 months. 75% of those most recently cyberbullied said it was by someone they knew in real life. 62% said it was by a friend.
That last figure stops me every time I read it. The harm is not coming from strangers. It is coming from inside the friendship group.
The Permanence of Words
There is a second thing the screen has changed, and it is the part that worries me most as an educator. Words now have a permanence and a portability that spoken friendship never had. A throwaway comment at the canteen disappeared into the air. A throwaway comment in a group chat can be screenshotted, forwarded, saved, and produced again three weeks later, three months later, three years later.
I notice this in the language our pastoral team uses now. Phones are locked in lockers from the moment students arrive at Santa Maria until the final bell, and our youngest students do not bring smartphones to school at all. Even so, the fallout from group chats walks through our gates each morning. Conversations that used to be about a falling-out are now often about a screenshot taken the night before. Who took it? Who sent it? Who saw it? The original disagreement has frequently become the smaller part of the problem. The bigger part is the trail.
What We Owe Each Other
A girl can be warm in person and cutting online. A girl can be loyal to her best friend on Monday and forward a screenshot of that same friend on Tuesday. The disinhibition does not make her two-faced. It makes her, for a moment, less able to feel what the other person is feeling, because she cannot see her.
This is what I find myself wanting to say to parents, gently. The conversation worth having with our daughters is not really about phones. It is about what we owe each other when the ordinary cues are missing. It is about whether the version of her that lives in the group chat is one she would want her grandmother, or her future self, to read back. Before pressing send, there is one question worth pausing for. Would I say this to her face?
We model this more than we teach it. Our daughters watch how we speak about other parents in the school carpark. They watch what we forward, what we comment and what we type in our own group chats when we think no one is reading. They learn from what we do, not from what we tell them to do.
The Voice She Hears
The girls I see at Santa Maria are no different from any other generation of teenagers in what they want from friendship. They want to be known. They want to feel a sense of belonging. They want someone to sit with at lunch and someone to text on the way home. The medium has changed. What they need has not.
So when your daughter is sitting on her bed with her thumb hovering over the send button, will a voice inside her ask, What will be the impact of my message? Or would I say this to her face?
If not, perhaps you have not had this conversation, such an important one.
- cyberbullying in friendship groups, digital wellbeing for girls, Featured, Girls' Education Perth, group chat culture, online behaviour, parenting teenagers, respectful relationships, Santa Maria College, Student Wellbeing, teenage girls and social media
Author: Santa Maria College
Santa Maria College is a vibrant girls school with a growing local presence and reputation. Our Mission is to educate young Mercy women who act with courage and compassion to enrich our world. Santa Maria College is located in Attadale in Western Australia, 16 km from the Perth CBD. We offer a Catholic education for girls in Years 5 – 12 and have 1300 students, including 152 boarders.
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