@article{ref1,
title="It's Murder Out Today: Middle School Girls Speak Out about Girl Fighting",
journal="Children and schools",
year="2011",
author="Letendre, Joan and Smith, Ellen",
volume="33",
number="1",
pages="47-57",
abstract="Girl fighting and its relational context is a problem that is receiving extensive attention in popular and academic circles. This article reports on a project that gathered the opinions from focus groups of seventh- and eighth-grade girls, organized to understand the perspectives of young adolescent girls in middle school on girl fighting. Both individual and contextual themes arose in the findings: the impact of the middle school structure, which differed from the more protected elementary school; the social structure that defined how girls interacted; the loyalty expressed toward members of the peer group and the betrayal felt when the bonds were not respected; the sensitivity that all girls felt toward racial stereotyping and teasing behaviors; the impact of teasing and the emotional reactivity that girls experienced when they felt hurt or betrayed; the differences in coping between seventh-grade and eighth-grade girls; and the school factors that supported or challenged girls' coping. Recommendations for universal schoolwide interventions as well as interventions targeted more specifically toward girls in distress are provided.<p />",
language="",
issn="1532-8759",
doi="",
url="http://dx.doi.org/"
}