By Meda Chesney-Lind

Rachel Simmons opens her book about girl-on-girl aggression - the hottest trend in the ongoing discussion on female victimization - with her own story. When she was 8, a "popular" friend whispered to Rachel's "best" friend that they should run away from Rachel, and they did, on the way to dance class at a local community theater. Simmons spent much of that year trying to make sense of their desertion. As she put it: "The sorrow is overwhelming." Now, she concludes, "is the time to end the silence."

This seems a little overblown. In fact, the silence on female aggression was broken by two books published a decade earlier: Men, Women and Aggression, by Anne Campbell (1991) and Of Mice and Women: Aspects of Female Aggression, edited by Kaj Bjorkqvist and Pirkko Niemela (1992). Simmons does, however, provide readers with powerful narratives about the pain that girls experience, and she has some useful suggestions to offer teachers and parents about helping girls be appropriately "aggressive" (confident, assertive and competitive) while avoiding mean strategies like vindictive gossip and social exclusion.

Essentially, Simmons' book popularizes research that youth workers need to know about. Though Simmons fails to note this, research by psychologist Nicki Crick at the University of Minnesota shows that girls who use relational aggression also are plagued by problems with depression, eating disorders and other anti-social behavior.

Youth workers have long been aware of the stereotype that girls are more difficult to work with than boys. Some of that difficulty is born of frustration. In contrast to a relatively rich array of programs addressing boys' problems, those who work with girls discover there are very few programs for girls, to say nothing of the lack of training on girls' problems. But it is also likely that girls in delinquency prevention programs are particularly vulnerable to (and capable of) relational aggression. Youth workers I have interviewed spoke about the difficulty of watching girls' "meanness" to other girls and to boys. Adults, too, may be targets of this relational aggression.

By exploring the little-known subject of aggression in girls, Odd Girl Out exposes the dimensions of an often overlooked aspect of growing up female: backstabbing, sneaky, manipulative, and exploitative "friends." This sort of aggression had not been the subject of thorough study until the last decade.

There is a current collection of books out on the topic, including Emily White's Fast Girls, Sharon Lamb's The Secret Lives of Girls and Rosalind Wiseman's Queen Bees and Wannabes. Phyllis Chesler wrote Woman's Inhumanity to Woman about the same aggressive behavior in adult women. Simmons' book, though, leads the pack in sales.

The media seem endlessly fascinated by the "dark" side of femininity, and our culture routinely declines to accept - evidence and experience to the contrary - that girls' "nontraditional" behavior like fighting or cruel gossiping is common, making possible the periodic revelation of these attributes. Such "discoveries" of something awful in the behavior or makeup of girls and women occur about once a decade. What rarely follows is a careful discussion of how this behavior serves and fits into the lives of ordinary girls and how it is an outgrowth and consequence of society's disempowerment of girls.

Today, with all this hype, the question is being asked: Are girls meaner than boys? The short answer is: No. The longer, more interesting answer is still no, but it is complicated by how you define aggression. Studies on male and female aggression routinely show that, while boys tend to specialize in physical or direct (hitting or verbal attacks) aggression, girls are more likely to use relational aggression. This distinction is so common that, when relational aggression is included with physical, gender differences in aggression disappear. Crick and associates contend that the old focus, that only males are aggressive, has been replaced by a new perspective, positing "males and females to be equally aggressive."

Psychologists define aggression as behavior intended to hurt or harm others. This includes a wide variety of actions, from rolling one's eyes and ignoring others to assault, rape and murder. Relational aggression (and other "alternative" forms), according to Simmons, is employed when the aggressor can't, for some reason, express her aggression directly - physically or verbally - at the target. There are problems with a definition of "aggression" that links such widely disparate behaviors as rolling the eyes at a stupid remark with murder. True, this is a meaning unique to psychologists, but the rest of us should remember that the degree of harm is important. Being on the receiving end of sarcasm may make us depressed and sad for a day (or six); being on the receiving end of a fist or a gun can kill us.

Simmons bases her book on the work of Crick and her associates at the University of Minnesota and on what Finnish and British researchers have found working in the same field. They have identified three sub-types of covert, nonphysical aggression:

o Relational aggression: including acts that "harm others through damage (or the threat of damage) to relationships or feelings of acceptance, friendship, or group inclusion".

o Indirect aggression: covert behavior where the target is not directly confronted and tactics such as ignoring and rumor spreading are used.

o Social aggression: aggression that "damages another's self-esteem or social status," including negative body language like rolling the eyes and giving mean looks.

Simmons contends that girls are socialized into a double bind. They must be good, nice and quiet and they are also told to have and value close and intimate relationships. With intimacy comes conflict, of course, and, according to Simmons, girls fear that expressing conflict will damage their relationships.

Girls experience anger, Simmons says, but they're not permitted to express it: They "fear that even everyday acts of conflict would result in the loss of people they most cared about." Trapped in this constraining gender-defined role, some girls craft ways to express anger through covertly aggressive means that they practice beneath the radar of most parents and teachers, since adults have their hands full dealing with the much more obvious physical aggression and violence of boys. "Day-to-day aggression that persists among girls, a dark underside of their social universe, remains uncharted and unexplored."

Odd Girl Out explores this dark side with story after story of girls hurting other girls. But this largely anecdotal approach is not as thorough - or well-documented - as the subject deserves. In preparation for the book, Simmons spent a year talking with girls attending 10 schools in three geographic areas, but she doesn't name even the locales, identifying them only as a major middle-Atlantic city, a Northeastern city, and a small town in Mississippi.

She does not disclose how many girls she interviewed, nor does she provide any demographic information. She also interviewed "approximately fifty" adult women (again, no demographic information). Even the anecdotes tell nothing of the social class or ethnic background of the girls whose stories she tells. This is problematic since even she notes in her one, brief chapter on girls of color (Hispanic and African-American only), that some ethnic groups (particularly African- American families) teach their girls how to fight physically, and they seem less prone to relational aggression. This epiphany would have been readily available to Simmons had she read any of the books currently available on girls in gangs (for example, Jody Miller's One of the Guys).

It is important to keep in mind the fact that boys also engage in this behavior (ironically, among boys, it is more condemned than physical violence); and the context of any aggressive behavior is important to interpreting it. Alternative aggression is, fundamentally, a weapon of the weak. As such, it is as reflective of powerlessness as it is of meanness. Women and other oppressed groups have not, historically, been permitted direct aggression without terrible consequences. As a result, in certain contexts and against certain foes, relational aggression was how the powerless punished the bad behavior of the powerful. It was how slaves and indentured servants - female and male - got back at abusive masters, how women dealt with violent husbands before legal divorce, and how working women today get back at abusive bosses.

The myopic focus of Odd Girl Out - girls targeting other girls - misses the point: Girls live in a world that largely ignores and marginalizes them while it empowers young boys (whose physical and relational aggression against girls goes virtually unmentioned in Simmons' book).

Certainly, we want to change much about girlhood, and we do want to stop girls from hurting other, weaker girls. But, even in a perfect world, girls will need to know something about how to "do" relational aggression. After all, Machiavelli taught us that, while all of us are supposed to be good, if we want to be successful politically and are forced to make the choice, it is much safer to be feared than loved. The world, even the male world, is not a perfect place. Girls need many and varied skills to survive it.

The media hype surrounding the recent "discovery" of relational meanness implies that this "new" attribute makes girls' aggression about as bad as boys' - or worse. But that is simply not the case: Nearly all girls' aggression is nonviolent. This does not mean girls are perfect, but let's keep some perspective:

• More than 80 percent of those under age 18 arrested for serious crimes of violence are boys, according to the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

• It is not gossip but direct violence (as practiced by males) that gives the United States, according to the U.S. Surgeon General, the highest rate of firearm-related deaths among youths in the industrialized world.

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