A 2001 study of school girls show that around 70 percent of these students have experienced bullying sometime in their academic careers. This statistic is roughly equivalent to that found from research only focused on boys.
Previously, many statistics have shown that boys tend to bully more in school when compared to girls. Such studies are looking at inner-school aggression. One thing to note about such studies is their definition of aggression. These studies only look at physical aggression. Once researchers began to look at aggression in different ways, defining aggression as any form of purposeful negative actions towards another, they found that females are just as likely to be aggressive in schools.
Statistical studies can let us know the types of bullying that occur at school. For girls, bullying usually comes in the form of relationship destruction or harm to reputation. Some examples of the more common incidents of inner-school bullying when females are involved are behaviors such as social exclusion of others, verbal mistreatment of peers, nonverbal mistreatment of peers (using criticizing nonverbal communication such as negative facial expressions or body language) and rumor-spreading. Statistics show that violence is not a common form of bullying for females.
After the recognition of the high inner-school bullying frequency of females, researchers began to look at the causes for female bullying. Researchers studying this topic, such as M. Goodwin, have found that, like male bullying, female bullying stems from competition. While males often bully to show their physical strength, females bully to show social status. This is mainly because females attach more importance to where they lie in the social hierarchy of a school than do boys. Thus, bullying behavior from female students usually have the motive of gaining reputation or social status through the diminishment of the reputation or social status of others.