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Exclusion and the Silent Treatment Are Violence — Relational Aggression and Its Digital Amplification

By Leon MoriguchiPublished May 15, 2026Updated May 18, 20265 min read日本語版あり
Audience
Parents of upper-elementary-age children (primarily girls, though applicable to boys)

TL;DR

  • ·Relational aggression — using relationships as weapons through exclusion, silent treatment, and rumor — is linked in its victims to loneliness and depression, just as physical victimization is, and can wear down self-esteem through the belief "I am someone who is not accepted"
  • ·Digital environments have expanded the circuit: exclusion can now happen continuously and invisibly, the record can be reopened and re-read repeatedly, and conflicts can escalate through the night before school even starts
  • ·Setting ground rules in advance — such as "phones stay with a parent after 9 p.m." — is a more sustainable way to catch hidden harm than demanding "show me your messages," and it does less damage to trust

Contents

  1. Lead
  2. What Relational Aggression Is
  3. Crick and Grotpeter's Definition
  4. Long-Term Effects on Victims: Internalizing Problems
  5. The Digital Version
  6. How Group Exclusion Now Works
  7. Records That Cut Both Ways
  8. Escalation After Bedtime
  9. What Parents Can Do
  10. The Question of Checking Messages
  11. Working With the School
  12. Putting It Into Practice
  13. Summary
  14. References

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 showed that this form of attack — using relationships as weapons — had been overlooked by earlier aggression research. A follow-up study the next year reported that children targeted by relational aggression, like victims of physical aggression, were more likely to experience depression and loneliness [2]. This article examines what relational aggression is, and how smartphones and social media have expanded and transformed its reach.

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