Originally Posted by polarbear
... the catty/possessive thing with other girls became full-on and hasn't really let up... teachers still tend to see it as a girl issue (particularly so as the girls reach puberty and hormones are all over the place!) and not as an overtly bullying issue.
Just as abuse can be physical or mental, bullying can occur in different forms. While physical aggression has long been recognized as bullying, relational aggression is only recently becoming better understood as bullying. In addition to the catty/possessive aspects, relational aggression may include cyber bullying.

A web search on relational aggression yields an extensive list of results to explore.

The book Queen Bees and Wannabes (2002) and the movies Freaky Friday (2003) and Mean Girls (2004) may have helped raise awareness of relational aggression.