A very long, but interesting, article on the female side of adolescent aggression. If you have young daughters (neices, granddaughters, etc), there's a lot here you need to know.

] Girls Just Want to Be Mean
]
] Wiseman's class is about gossip and cliques and
] ostracism and just plain meanness among girls. But
] perhaps the simplest way to describe its goals would be
] to say that it tries to make middle-school girls be nice
] to one another. This is a far trickier project than you
] might imagine.... The
] girls whom Wiseman variously calls the Alpha Girls, the
] Really Mean Girls or the Queen Bees are the
] ones who are supposed to own up to having back-stabbed or
] dumped a friend, but they are also the most resistant to
] the exercise and the most self-justifying.