My 14 year-old daughter is being tortured by girls of her class. They have stopped phoning her, do not even say hello when they meet, speak badly of her behind her back, always comment on and make fun of what she says, etc. She has become an outcast, frozen out and completely isolated. As a mother, I have a great sense of grief and helplessness in the face of what my daughter has to go through. Please help! I even tried talking to the parents of those girls but to no avail.

This was a letter on the Net that reflects the manner of bullying by girls today. Strangely, I cannot remember an occasion when such bullying took place when I was in school — or for that matter when my children were in school. Yet, now, when my grandchildren are teenagers, it seems rife. So much so that the problem has spawned studies, books and films. Notable amongst them is the book Queen Bees and Wannabes by Rosalind Wiseman and the film Mean Girls based on it.

This brand of bullying seems to be the speciality of girls. While boys display their physical strength to dominate their victims, girls use emotional warfare. Instead of direct assault, they resort to indirect methods of aggression, such as spreading rumours, and ostracising their victims. The female version is by far the more cruel, bypassing physical pain and going right to the core of a girl’s being. To quote Valerie Besag, the author of a study on the subject, “Female bullying is worse than male bullying, because it is more personal, more psychological and much more emotionally destructive. It can leave lifelong scars, scars that take much longer to heal than cuts and bruises inflicted by boys on each other.”

Instigating this form of bullying is, as Rosalind Wiseman terms it, the Queen Bee, a girl whose popularity rests on fear and control. “Through a combination of charisma, force, money, looks, will and manipulation,” says Wiseman, “the Queen Bee reigns supreme over other girls and weakens their friendships with others, thereby strengthening her own power and influence.” The clique she forms is her court, the members of which invariably do her bidding.

Targets can and do change. But does the Queen Bee choose her new victims purely on whim? One Queen Bee I know of routinely moves from one member of her clique to another. It is as though, having stripped a girl of all self-esteem and reduced her to a state of misery, she loses interest in her and looks for another, thereby giving each new torturer-turned-victim a taste of her own medicine — and, belatedly, a realisation of her own cruelty.

And what happens to the Queen Bee? I suspect that trapped in her own power games, she ends up as lonely and isolated as do her victims. At least I hope so.