Girl-to-Girl bullying drama is high stakes and ‘unsolved’ in an Irish school context. This paper interrogates concepts of intra-action and response-ability, to consider the human materialities at play in girl-to-girl bullying. The paper will draw on examples from qualitative research with teens in Ireland, exploring the shaping of posthuman gender and ‘school bullying’ together with human agentic, matter such as place/space, objects and time, as co- constitutive processes. It will explore the key discursive-material agential intra-actions through which ‘girl’ materialize in school- space-being-matterings and re-matterings with a specific focus on skincare, skirts, sexting and swots. The paper will conclude with recommendations on how a focus on new materialism offers the potential to transform the focus and response to gender bullying in our schools. How does response-ability challenge bullying or actions that lack com-passion, feeling, caring?

This paper examines the issue related to the early age of those involved in female bullying. According to recent research, bullying also affects elementary school girls (SooHoo, 2009).

The early age at which girls are involved in the mechanism of female bullying is related to their greater exposure to a social reality that pushes them to conform to the standards of "adulthood."

As a result, if female bullying is linked to the enactment of specific gender scripts involving the reiteration of toxic intra-gender behaviors, girls as early as elementary school introject stereotypes about the feminine that lead them to act out violence toward those who do not fit a performative standard (Ringrose, Renold, 2010).

Analysis of the focus groups conducted during the national research revealed some commonalities among girls who had experienced bullying. The most important of which concerned the absence in the girls' lives of reference adults who should, instead, act as scaffolding.

Despite the absence of reference adults, the protagonists of the focus groups reported that they were able to leverage self-empowerment processes, promoting positively transformative processes. This was probably due to good resilience skills that influenced coping strategies for dealing with situations of adversity

Bullying arises and develops within social relationships among peers (Novara &Regoliosi, 2007). Nevertheless, itbecomesobject of research in a systematic mode only in early1970s(Olweus, 1978). We know from the literature that it is a complex, multifaceted, and evolving social phenomenon (De Vita & Burgio, 2023), characterized by a power asymmetry, a specific intentionality, and a prolonged reiteration over time (Olweus, 1994). Two main roles are “staged”: the victim and the bully, enacted in front of a third party, the audience composed of peers.Their interactions create a complex relational dynamic that particularly affects the pre/adolescent period, during which the need for approval and friendship from peers emerges forcefully. Their role intersects the realms of love and social esteem, as addressed by the Recognition Theory (Honneth, 2002a; 2002b). The gaze of love-friendship (first form of recognition) and solidarity/social esteem from peers (second form of recognition) in this intense phase of human life supports the exploration of one's own identity (Dusi, 2017). Characteristic of this life phase are the definition of one's position in the social hierarchy and the management of one’s own reputation (Emler & Reicher, 2000).The mutual recognition among group members is crucial in determining belonging, and one of the fundamental objectives of the bully/ies is the victim’s marginalization (Olweus, 1994a). The target of bullying – in the majority of cases –are«those who differ from their peers» (Sharp & Smith, 1995, p. 145).In the context of complex relational dynamics among peers, any deviation from the “norm” constitutes a potential risk factor, which increases as the perceived degree of “diversity” grows (De Vita & Burgio, 2023), leading to possible stigma and rendering adolescents potentially vulnerable (Attawell, 2012) to aggression and abuse from their peers.Hence, in the present work, lights (complicity, support, friendship) and shadows (manipulation, competition, destructiveness) of relationships among girls are interpreted through the constructs of social stigma (Goffman, 1963) and recognition, including its negative forms (Honneth, 2002b; Ricoeur, 2005).

Methodology

The comparative analysis of focus group data using Constant Comparison Analysis (Glaser & Strauss, 1967; Glaser, 1978; 1992; Strauss, 1987) allowed for conceptual reflection on the content of discussions (Duchesne &Haegel, 2004), attempting to explore how, in the phenomenon of female bullying, social stigma rooted in diversity intersects with the need/desire for recognition. In this delicate phase of transition, the possibility of appreciating the emerging “new self” and recognizing oneself within it largely depends on the gaze of peers.

In the case of girls, a central role is played by the body (Zimmer-Gembeck& Webb, 2017; De Vita &Vittori, 2022), and during adolescence, the onset of the erotic body (Pietropolli Charmet, 2013) imposes a new physicality that exposes the teenager to the gaze of peers (Dusi, 2024b) in a moment of maximum vulnerability. It is a time when one grapples with the need to be accepted and recomposed into a renewed self-image, capable of encompassing what one is and what one is becoming (Dusi, 2024).

Bullying, traditionally defined as unwanted aggressive behaviour repeated over time and characterised by a real or perceived power imbalance between perpetrators and victims (Olweus, 1996), represents a global problem and a fundamental violation of human rights (Greene, 2006). UNESCO (2019) estimates that one in three students is a victim of bullying. The incidence of this phenomenon underscores the importance of continuing to study modes of expression and strategies for counteraction. While male bullying has been extensively researched, female bullying has received less attention, perhaps because it is less visible and, in some aspects, more complex than male bullying, involving articulated, cross-sectional, and multi-dimensional interactions (De Vita, 2021; De Vita & Burgio, 2023). Emphasizing the need to avoid rigid dichotomies, research suggests that bullying is predominantly an intra-gender phenomenon and that female and male bullying may manifest differently. In order to better understand the gender dynamics underlying bullying and to deepen the understanding of female bullying, a national project involving multidisciplinary research units from six Italian universities was carried out. The research had three main goals: to achieve a deeper understanding of female bullying; to investigate the incidence of female bullying compared to male bullying in terms of frequency and intensity in Italy; to develop counteraction and prevention devices in the involved schools and to launch an awareness campaign. To achieve these goals, a mixed-method research design was adopted. The purpose of this contribution is to present the results of the quantitative study regarding the assessment of the extent and characteristics of bullying in the national territory and the exploration of possible gender differences in the interpretation of the phenomenon. The target population consisted of students attending the first two classes of upper secondary school in the cities of Arezzo, Foggia, Palermo, Perugia, and Verona, chosen as sample cities. To achieve the objectives of the quantitative part of the research, the “Bullying Survey” questionnaire (Swearer, 2001) was used. The survey involved 2,481 respondents (Batini et al., 2023). The results show an incidence of the phenomenon of 8.4% (6.1% for boys and 9.6% for girls), if only frequent acts of bullying are considered, and 45.3% (44.6% for boys and 45.7% for girls) if occasional acts are also included. These findings confirm what has been reported in the literature, namely that bullying: 1) mainly takes place in the classroom and online; 2) materializes within the peer group (girls/boys of the same school year); 3) is predominantly an intra-gender phenomenon; 4) is most commonly manifested in relational spaces and verbally. Furthermore, gender-specific data analysis revealed multiple gender differences, including forms of bullying with a more prevalent verbal-relational mode in girls and “pranking” as a typical mode only among boys. The study provides an important contribution to bullying research, confirming the relevance of the phenomenon and highlighting the unique perspective of girls. In conclusion, the adoption of a gender perspective in the study of bullying has proven useful for a better understanding of the phenomenon, especially in terms of implementing effective prevention and counteraction interventions.