Girl-to-girl bullying in early adolescence : beyond "bully", "victim", "bystander"

The purpose of this project was to ascertain young adolescent girls' conceptualizations of girl-to-girl bullying specifically during the transition year to secondary school. The literature reveals that bullying is high amongst girls at that time. In order to provide a background for understanding bullying, I analyzed some of the ways in which this type of aggression is contextualized in schools, their families, and their cultural communities, and include the girls' opinions of these shaping forces. I also examined the range of ways in which girls can be bullied by their female peers, giving attention to the girls' perceptions of the causes, conditions, and consequences of bullying. This small-scale exploratory field study took place in two urban secondary schools in one British Columbia Lower Mainland school district in the fall of 1993. Three ethnographic methods were used: participant observation; tape-recorded in-depth interviews with fifteen grade 8 and 9 girls; and researcher-solicited written narratives. Using those latter accounts, grade 9 Drama students created and performed short plays in the classroom on the theme of same-sex bullying. These skits provided additional insights into girls' definitions of bullying going on amongst them. The girls' friendships and peer groups provided the main context for inter-girl bullying incidents. Whereas most of the girls in this study employed the term "fighting" as an equivalent for bullying, I organize the wide range of hurtful behaviours they chronicled under three basic headings: betrayal, intimidation, and humiliation. The ways in which they carried out their aggressive acts were dependent on the various "weapons" at their disposal and the skill with which they deployed them. The evidence gleaned from this study suggests that existing definitions of bullying-traditionally grounded in male experiences-ought to be extended to include one-time incidents, verbal, physical, and attitudinal types of bullying that are specific to girls, and unintentional bullying of the joking kind. Of further note, I discovered that almost three-quarters of the girls I interviewed had played more than one bullying role, calling into question the usually mutually exclusive use of labels "bully", "victim", and "by-stander".Education, Faculty ofEducational Studies (EDST), Department ofGraduat