Adolescence And Aggression

Adolescence can be described as a period of transition in which an individual progresses towards adulthood from childhood (Smith, Cowie &Blades, 2003), generally beginning at 11 years of age and lasting through teenage years. It is not only a period of transition but also a period of rapid growth, development and change. The change can be seen in biological as well as psychological aspects. Biological changes are seen through the onset of puberty and development of secondary sexual characters and the various hormonal changes while psychological changes can be seen in the form of development of an identity and personality, understanding gender roles, progressing towards social independence.

During these developmental years, adolescents face

Aggression may manifest itself in many ways may take various forms such as social and verbal aggression, physical aggression and more serious kinds of violence. Physical aggression includes behaviors that are directed towards inflicting physical harm and involve violent crimes such as “robbery, rape and homicide “(Loeber & Hay, 1997; Yonas, O'Campo, Burke, Peak, & Gielen, 2005).Contrary to physical aggression is , social aggression which “encompasses various forms of non-physical aggression” .Socially aggressive behaviors are directed and focused on damaging and threating social relations rather than causing physical harm.(Archer & Coyne, 2005). Examples of socially aggressive behaviors include “gossiping” (Xie, Swift, Cairns, & Cairns, 2002), “excluding or alienating” a person from a group and social situations. (Xie, Swift et al., 2002), and an attempt to cause harm to an individual’s social standing in a group (Crick & Grotpeter,

Bully-victims can be described as those individual who are involved in bullying and also experience victimization.. Hawker and Boulton (2000) define peer victimization as “experience of being a target of a peer’s hurtful teasing and aggressive behaviors’’. Peer-victimization can be either direct or indirect. Direct forms of victimization can be defined as open provocative attacks whereas indirect forms of victimization can be understood as covert attempts of manipulation. Evidence suggests that direct victimization is more likely to be experienced by boys, whereas indirect victimization is more likely to be experienced by girls (Bjorkqvist et al., 1992; Crick& Grotpeter, 1995, Olweus, 1985, 1993; Whitney & Smith, 1993). Peer victimization can result in devastating consequences for children and adolescents. Evidence accumulated suggests that indirect victimization is more harmful than direct victimization (Crick & Bigbee, 1998; Hawker and Boulton,