I was reading an article this morning, “Threatened Author Back in Netherlands”. Hirsi Ali’s entire situation is alarming, but this paragraph jumped out at me.
The Somali-born Hirsi Ali, now 37, quit parliament last year when the immigration minister _ a woman from her own party _ tried to strip her of her Dutch citizenship for falsifying her age and name on her refugee application 14 years earlier.
The minister, Rita Verdonk, was forced to back down, but the issue prompted the collapse of the government and an early election.
In Wikipedia, I read that Verdonk originally didn’t want to look into the matter of the falsification, but was specifically requested to by a member of Parliament. So at this point, I’m unclear as to what happened or the specifics, but it’s clear the fallout was substantial.
Still, even though I don’t know how much, if any, relational aggression was involved, the above Comcast news article made me think about relational aggression and how women relate to one another in all arenas of life. How much of the dynamics of relational aggression and how we deal with conflict with one another as women do we take with us into our professional and business lives? According to my friend, Cheryl Dellasega, author of “Mean Girls Grown Up”
I have to ask myself, would I think of relational aggression if this occurred between two men? Men engage in mud slinging and digging in each others’ closets for political gain or spite all the time. It’s one scandal after another, so that the public is almost numb to it.
I think that a principle player came from within Hirsi Ali’s own party, just reminded me of how girls in the same clique can turn on each other so quickly. If it had been a rival party, I might not have thought that much about it. But then I am, also, aware of the prejudice we have towards women and our tendency to make even legitimate conflicts into “cat fights”. It’s a way we trivialize women’s humanity.
Still, I know that relational aggression isn’t just constrained to any particular age group. Whether or not relational aggression had any part in what played out between Hirsi Ali and Verdonk or not or whether articles are slanted to highlight conflict just because they occur between two women, it’s a fact that relational aggression does occur among women throughout all stratas of society.
It’s a choice, actually, that is available to each one of us every day of our lives.
Cheryl Dellasega’s book referenced in this article:
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