Lead
"No hitting." "Nothing was taken." Once those two facts are established, the situation can become harder to name. Ignoring someone, leaving them out of a group, spreading rumors, not inviting them. None of these is physical assault, but each causes serious harm to the child on the receiving end — a pattern developmental psychology has documented repeatedly for decades.
Crick and Grotpeter's 1995 paper gave the concept a clear definition: relational aggression: harming others by manipulating relationships — through exclusion, the silent treatment, rumor-spreading, or threatening friendship withdrawal [1]. Their research demonstrated that this form of attack — using relationships as weapons — is easy to overlook, and that its psychological effects on victims can be equivalent to, or worse than, those of physical aggression. This article examines what relational aggression is, and how smartphones and social media have expanded and transformed its reach.