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"good," nonaggressive girl into fact: The first experiments on aggression were performed with almost no female subjects. Since males tend to exhibit aggression directly, researchers concluded aggression was expressed in only this way. Other forms of aggression, when they were observed, were labeled deviant or ignored.
    Studies of bullying inherited these early research flaws. Most psychologists looked for direct aggressions like punching, threatening, or teasing. Scientists also measured aggression in environments where indirect acts would be almost impossible to observe. Seen through the eyes of scientists, the social lives of girls appeared still and placid as lakes. It was not until 1992 that someone would question what lay beneath the surface.
    That year, a group of Norwegian researchers published an unprecedented study of girls. They discovered that girls were not at all averse to aggression, they just expressed anger in unconventional ways. The group predicted that "when aggression cannot, for one reason or another, be directed (physically or verbally) at its target, the aggressor has to find other channels." The findings bore out their theory: cultural rules against overt aggression led girls to engage in other, nonphysical forms of aggression. In a conclusion un- characteristic for the strength of its tone, the researchers challenged the image of sweetness among female youth, calling their social lives "ruthless," "aggressive," and "cruel." 9
    Since then, a small group of psychologists at the University of Minnesota has built upon these findings, identifying three subcategories of aggressive behavior: relational, indirect, and social aggression.
Relational aggression
includes acts that "harm others through damage (or the threat of damage) to relationships or feelings of acceptance, friendship, or group inclusion." 10 Relationally aggressive behavior is ignoring someone to punish them or get one's own way, excluding someone socially for revenge, using negative body language or facial expressions, sabotaging someone else's relationships, or threatening to end a relationship unless the friend agrees to a request. In these acts, the aggressor uses her relationship with the target as a weapon.
    Close relatives of relational aggression are indirect aggression and social aggression.
Indirect aggression
allows the aggressor to avoid confronting her target. It is covert behavior in which the aggressor makes it seem as though there has been no intent to hurt at all. One way this is possible is by using others as vehicles for inflicting pain on a targeted person, such as by spreading a rumor.
Social aggression
is intended to damage self-esteem or social status within a group. It includes some indirect aggression like rumor spreading or social exclusion. Throughout the book, I refer to these behaviors collectively as
alternative aggressions.
As the stories in the book make clear, alternative aggressions often appear in conjunction with more direct behaviors.
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    beneath the radar
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    In Margaret Atwood's novel
Cat's Eye,
the young protagonist Elaine is seated frozen in fear on a windowsill, where she has been forced to remain in silence by her best friends as she waits to find out what she had done wrong. Elaine's father enters the room and asks if the girls are enjoying the parade they have been watching:
Cordelia gets down off her windowsill and slides up onto mine, sitting close beside me.
"We're enjoying it extremely, thank you very much," she says in her voice for adults. My parents think she has beautiful manners. She puts an arm around me, gives me a little squeeze, a squeeze of complicity, of instruction. Everything will be all right as long as I sit still, say nothing, reveal nothing.... As soon as my father is out of the room Cordelia turns to face me.... "You know what this means don't you? I'm afraid you'll have to be punished."
    Like many girl bullies, Cordelia maneuvers her anger quietly beneath the surface of