If you want to know what’s going  on in the world of adolescent girls, just spend 15 minutes observing them in the school cafeteria.
Lunch is a chance to freely socialize, and it’s a microcosmic snapshot of girls and their friendships.

    These relationships determine everything: social status, security, confidence and, most importantly, how girls will navigate the complex world of middle school. If it were possible to be the proverbial fly on the cafeteria wall, here a few scenes you might observe:
Table 1: A group of girls sit closely together, chatting. One girl whispers to another, and she responds by laughing loudly. When asked by the others what the joke was about, both say it was nothing. One girl is sure it was about her. She decides not to buy lunch that day so she can stay and monitor the conversation.
Table 2: One girl is sitting with all boys. She doesn’t have any close girlfriends because she doesn’t like the drama they cause. She says she doesn’t care what the other girls think of her, but secretly she longs for one female friend.
Table 3: A group of girls is ignoring one friend. She feels invisible. She eats quickly and escapes, pretending she has somewhere else to go. Most days, she heads to the school nurse complaining of a stomachache.   

    Dozens of other scenarios are taking place, including girls who are getting along.  In a given week, however, most middle school girls will report being hurt on some level by a friend.
    “I wish they would be like boys and just hit me and get it over with,” one 14-year-old girl told me. Bruises heal, but emotional pain can last a lifetime. The girl is describing what researcher Nikki Crick has termed “relational aggression.” It’s a form of female bullying that involves damaging or manipulating relationships, mainly by exclusion.

Relational aggression

    Signs of relational aggression are evident with some girls as young as pre-school when one friend tells another, “If you play with her, you can’t play with me.” Forms of exclusion include ignoring, eye rolling, mean faces, glaring and damaging a girl’s reputation. By middle school, the stakes are even higher due to technology.
    The difference between elementary and middle school girls is their use of social media, says Kara Underwood, a fifth-grade teacher at Lee Eaton Elementary in Nordonia Hills who taught seventh grade last year in the same school system. “I would hear conversations of girls sending out mass texts to their classmates to spread horrible rumors about another girl simply to humiliate her. Or they would refuse to pick up cell phone calls or reply to texts to isolate another girl in their peer group.”
    Electronic harassment also happens at Center Middle School in Strongsville, according to school counselor Jenny Morganti. She notes a recent case between two girls involving a nasty note. “The note stated things such as ‘no-one wants to be your friend, we are friends with you only as a charity case, you are a follower and we no longer want you in our lives.’”
    After further review, however, Morganti determined the case was not as it appeared. “It was determined that this student wrote the note to herself and signed it from another girl in order to get her friends to go against this other girl.”