This paper explores preadolescent girls’ story telling of a bullying incident in a Swedish school. Of particular interest is how the girls as part of their story telling invoke and resist categories such as Bully, Victim, Reinforcer of the Bully and Defender of the Victim. The approach taken presents an alternative to traditional research on bullying in school that have had a strong focus on characteristics of individual children as predisposed to act as bullies or victims, and on individual children’s perceptions of and attitudes towards acts of bullying, bullies and victims (Rigby, 2004; Smith & Brain, 2000). Underlying much of this research is a theoretical perspective on bullying as “the outcome of individual differences” (Rigby, 2004, p. 289-290). Instead we argue for the need to focus on bullying as a social rather than an individual phenomenon, and the adult world as both constraining and enabling. In line with the shift that has occurred in recent years in the field of childhood studies that assumes an interpretative approach to the study of children (Corsaro, 1992, 2005), we see children and their peer cultures as worthy of documentation and study in their own right.

The study is based on focus group interviews with three girls’ friendship groups in sixth grade in a socially and ethnically heterogeneous school in Sweden. The analysis draws on a performative perspective of narrative-in-interaction and on ethnomethodological concerns for members’ understanding of social categories (Sacks, 1972), treating interviewing as an interactional event in which the participants draw on their cultural knowledge of schooling. Within this perspective the notion of identity is theoretically located in the social rather than in the individual (Smith & Sparkes, 2008) which challenges the individualistic points of departure for much research on bullying.

Preliminary results points to the importance that story-telling plays in the local construction of bullying and the related identities (bully, victim, defender, reinforcer, etc). The act of telling peers, the researcher or the teachers about bullying can in itself be seen as constitutive of bullying and the related identities bullies and victims. Through the story-telling of a past bullying episode the girls (re)organize social relations, negotiate moral order and index (in)appropriate gender behaviors. Negative and positive affiliations with the identity categories bully, victim, reinforcer of bully and defender of the victim has to be understood in relation to the local contexts in which those categories are made relevant and to a public discourses on bullying offering recognizable plots and evaluations. The results undermine essentialist notions about the nature of bullying as based mainly on individual differences in aggressive behaviours or as an isolated phenomenon separated from children’s peer cultures and other issues at schools. Our study points to the need to approach bullying as a social process intertwined with and unseparable from children’s peer cultures and everyday school life, where children have to establish and handle relationships with other children and adults they have not chosen or cannot leave.