ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at the different ways in which some girls act that are seen by others in schools as ‘problems’ and of the processes through which a range of different girls and young women may become identified as ‘problems’. It challenges the dominant psycho-medical model of Emotional and Behaviour Difficulties (EBD), arguing that this approach, paradoxically, while individualising the ‘problem’, and ignoring the social processes of the construction of deviance, also denies the individual human experience of the girls and young women so labelled. Their individual lives, with their complexities of human experience, are subsumed under a range of medicalised categories. They become described as an ‘ADHD’ (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder) or SEN pupil or as an ‘EBD girl’.
