Girls' bullying ways more social, conference told
April 5, 2007
Trish Crawford
STAFF WRITER
Ottawa–While school officials grappled for years with boys who fought and broke the rules, mean girls slipped under their radar to torment and abuse each other in secret aggression, an international conference on bullying was told yesterday.
Only since 1995, when groundbreaking studies by female social scientists pointed out that exclusion, gossiping, eye-rolling and a host of social behaviours were seriously hurting school girls was the term "social aggression" coined, Carleton University psychologist Tina Daniels told 400 delegates.
It is so widespread, that by Grade 7, one third of girls report conflict in their relationships.
Little is known about the phenomenon although a girl's best defence is to have a large group of friends, Daniels said.
Broadly defined, social aggression is "deliberate behaviour designed to hurt another person through words and other non-physical manner."
As one Grade 8 girl put it, "You don't have to be nice. You just have to look nice."
Depression, anxiety, poor self-esteem, leaving school and even suicide can result, as it did in 2000 for Dawn Marie Wesley, a British Columbia girl of 14 who hanged herself but left a note, saying she feared bullying would end in her murder, as it did for Reena Virk. This week's conference was dedicated to Virk, only 14, when a prolonged beating by teens, many of them girls, led to her slaying in 1997.
Toronto Star