Girls wound each other with invisible weapons, study suggests

Boys are the typical recipients of punches and bruises from their peers, but new research suggests that girls fall prey to a more insidious brand of aggression.

More than 10 percent of girls in a study of 383 fourth- and fifth-graders were victims of rumor-mongering, exclusion from peer groups and other forms of nonphysical aggression that the study?s authors call 'relational aggression.' Less than 4 percent of boys were similarly victimized.

'Physical aggression isn?t very accepted for girls, so they turn to manipulation and emotional threats as weapons,' says psychologist Nicki Crick, PhD, a researcher at the University of Minnesota. 'They spread rumors; they threaten to withdraw from a valued relationship; they use friendship as a vehicle of harm.'

Aggression research has mostly focused on boys because the physical fighting they engage in is highly visible, Crick says. Relationship warfare among girls is less obvious but just as harmful says Crick, who conducted the study with Maureen Bigbee of Ramsey Elementary School in Anoka, Minn. The study appears in the April issue of APA?s Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology (Vol. 66, No. 2,

p. 337?347). Girls in the study more often suffered blows to the heart than to the body. Only 1 percent of them fell victim to threats and actual acts of physical violence, compared with close to 10 percent of the boys.

Crick speculates that society socializes girls to value social ties, so they learn to hurt one another by damaging those ties. Such relational aggression can cause lingering harm, the study indicates. Both physical and relational victimization led to submissive, depressive behavior or hostile, bitter behavior in the youngsters.

But the victims of relational aggression had the hardest time suppressing anger and were most prone to angry outbursts. Crick considers that finding a red flag.

'Relational victims have this simmering anger that could be a roadblock to successful relationships in the future,' says Crick. 'They lack social confidence and could have a harder time building marriages and families of their own. They?re also more vulnerable to deviant paths like early sexual activity and drug abuse.'

To prevent the sort of malaise, Crick advises parents, teachers and mental health professionals to teach children how to negotiate and assert themselves without aggression.

?B. Murray