Reducing girls' relational aggression.

• Position: Urban Schools - Brief article

Educators, particularly In urban settings, should teach elementary school-aged girls problem-solving skills and provide them leadership opportunities as a way to reduce their relational aggression, suggests a study from the Violence Prevention Initiative at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia (Pa.). Relational aggression Includes using gossip and social exclusion to harm others, which is the most common form of aggression among girls.

The study was a randomized control trial with third- to fifth-grade urban African-American girls to evaluate the effectiveness of the Friend to Friend (F2F) aggression prevention program, which is a relational aggression intervention to demonstrate a decrease in relationally aggressive behaviors among urban minority girls that continued at least a year after the conclusion...