topic proposal

Hello Mrs Yarbrough,

I know I'am becoming a pain, could you please find time from your busy
schedule to let me know if I'am on the right track thank you very much
Felicita Harris.

Girls, Bullying Behaviours and Peer Associations: The Double Edged Sword of
the Exclusive and the Rejected

Bullying is recognized to be a reliably identifiable separation of
children's aggressive behavior (Dodge, Coie, Pettit and Price, 1990).
While little appears to be known directly about girls' bullying behaviors,
recent research has shed considerable light upon related fields. Lagerspetz,
Bjorqvist and Peltonen, (1988) have revealed that girls use indirect methods
of aggression, such as spreading rumors and
excluding and ostracizing others; and Crick, Bigbee and Howes (1996) report
that with relational aggression, girls' peer conflicts increase in frequency
and become more common as they move from middle childhood to adolescence.

Such socially manipulative strategies are also powerful tools often used by
girls to protect and maintain their peer relationships and friendship ,
which in turn reflect exclusivity, intensity and disclosure. These behaviors
appear to serve a dual function: to protect existing friendships from the
intrusion of others; and to deliberately harm target girls through rejection
and isolation. This research will included both report and peer proposal
instruments that will be administered to girls in individual classes from
Year 6 to Year 10 (N = ) at Mary Mc Leod Bethune school # 45.

This research will explore the apparent dual function of these behaviors
and examine the links between girls' peer relationships and bullying
behaviors in light of what is known about indirect and relational
aggression. Implications for co-operation and conflict management between
girls in schools will also be discussed. Aggression and bullying in our
schools systems are old problems. However, little is known about girls'
bullying behaviors, their perceptions of these behaviors, the impact on the
victim or the significance of their friendships in relation to these
behaviors. This research builds on what is known and asks new questions
relevant to a specific population in our schools who have up till now been
ignored in this field: girls.

Bullying is recognized to be a stable, ongoing, intentional one-way form of
violent activity, involving a power relationship between a victim who feels
helpless and a perpetrator who has control (Olweus, 1978; Tattum, 1989;
Smith, 1991; Slee, 1993; Rigby, 1996). Dodge, Coie, Pettit and Price (1990)
suggest that it can therefore be considered to be a reliably identifiable
sub type of children's aggression. Aggressive acts occurring between
individuals involve a specific intent to harm, but do not necessarily
involve a power differential, nor
repeated negativity.

these are distinctive characteristics of bullying behaviors. It is
therefore important to distinguish between aggressive acts which occur
between individuals/groups of equal status/position/power, and bullying,
where the victim generally feels that they have less or no power. Acts of
aggression can be considered to involve a two-way process of attack and
retaliation, whereby each party has a relatively equal stake in the
conflict. Bullying, however, describes a one-way attack situation whereby
the perpetrator has more power and where the victim rarely retaliates or
feels able to.

While the key issues of: intent to harm; repeated and ongoing negativity,
and a power imbalance are generally agreed with, bullying has however, been
defined and conceptualized in many different ways by researchers and
educators. One of the earliest definitions was put forward by Olweus who
suggested that: A bully is a boy who fairly often oppresses or harasses
somebody else; the target may be boys or girls, the harassment physical or
mental (Olweus, 1978).

The age groups and gender chosen by Olweus for his early studies in the
1970s reflected his interests in boy aggressors in the pre and pubescent
years and set the direction for the international research that followed.
Girls were largely ignored in this early bullying research tradition, as
their behaviors did not equate with the traditional view of bullying: overt,
direct physically aggressive behaviors more usually associated with boys.
Girls appear to have been only commented on in passing within the bullying
domination.

The early reports thus indicated lower levels of girls' involvement in
bullying activities, which may have been an outcome of the definitions used,
or the obvious, predominantly physically aggressive behaviors with which
they had to identify in previous research surveys. Thus, only those girls
who engaged in open, physical bullying may have been reported. The more
subtle and covert forms of negative, aggressive behavior were not adequately
recognized, identified or explored in these earlier studies. Girls have,
however, more recently been compared to boys in terms of incidence and age
differences with regard to bullying.

Research into bullying has demonstrated that boys are more likely to be
perpetrators and victims of bullying behaviors than are girls (Siann,
Callaghan, Glissov, Lockhart and Rawson, 1994; Olweus, 1991; Rigby, 1994).
Olweus, (1991) further reported that boys were responsible for the large
part of bullying that girls are subjected to.

The gender of the bully and victim would seem of some importance here. Most
of the earlier research concentrated on male: male or male: female bullying.
Bullying and gender harassment, however, are not the sole domain of male:
male or male: female encounters. Given that there are single-sex schools,
where there are no boys present to be either the perpetrator or the victim,
any bullying which occurs in these environments must be female: female. The
corollary of this then, is that co-educational schools would also have
female: female bullying incidents.

To date, these behaviors which occur between girls have been easily
dismissed as girls "just being bitchy", and have thus been vastly
underestimated due to the fact that the main focus of bullying
investigations has been predominantly overt bullying. The negative,
aggressive interactions known to occur between girls, and often referred to
as "bitchy behavior", reflect more subtle, relatively invisible acts of
aggression.

Female: female bullying has not specifically been investigated, however
most recently, research in the related field of aggression, has indicated
that girls use indirect forms of aggression (Lagerspetz, Bjorqvist and
Peltonen, 1988) or relational aggression (Crick and Grotpeter, 1995) when
aggressing against each other and that these are distinct characteristics of
girls' negative behaviours. In order to understand girls' bullying behaviors
more fully, then, it is necessary to understand the larger set of girls'
aggressive behaviors. Recent writings in the field of bullying seem to have
adopted these indirect and relational forms of aggression as girls' bullying
behaviors, without exploring whether girls perceive them to be.

This research aims to assess girls' ( Mary Mc Leod Bethune school # 45).
understanding of the concept and nature of bullying as it relates to them,
along with their perceptions of indirect aggressive behaviors as bullying
behaviors.

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