Showing friendship, fighting back, and getting even: resisting bullying victimization within adolescent girls’ friendships

ABSTRACT

Research suggests that about a quarter of bullying incidences occur within friendships. Yet little attention is given to the underlying social processes and wider macro-system forces that shape friendship victimization experiences. Guided by constructivist grounded theory and Wade's work on resistance, this research explored the phenomenon of victimization within adolescent girls’ friendships. Canadian women reflecting on their school-based victimization experiences were interviewed for this study. Results suggest that participants resisted victimization in important ways but that their resistance strategies were negotiated within gender expectations and ambient discursive constructions of resistance and victimization. Our findings illuminate the ways that discourses concealing women's resistance and privileging overt responses to bullying run counter to gendered expectations for resistance, leaving women in a double bind. Consequently, we found that retaliatory relational aggression allowed girls to deny their victim status while complying with gendered expectations for resistance but led to their bullying experiences being normalized and overlooked.

KEYWORDS:

• Resistance
• bullying
• victimization
• qualitative
• friendship
• gender

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Robert Thornberg http://orcid.org/0000-0001-9233-3862