A Qualitative Study of Peer Abuse and Its Effects: Theoretical and Empirical Implications

Peer abuse is an underestimated and neglected social problem (e.g., Besag, 1989; Roland & Munthe, 1989; Tattum & Lane, 1989), usually approached in psychology as peer aggression ("bullying") as well as victimization and peer rejection (e.g., Asher & Coie, 1990; Asher & Wheeler, 1985; Pepler & Rubin, 1991). Peer abuse has rarely been analyzed from a sociocultural perspective (Olweus, 1991), and is not generally used as a distinct concept. It is not yet an accepted topic of research in itself nor of concerted social policy in most Western countries (Kovarik, 1992, p. 37). In contrast, child abuse is generating much research, clinical work, and government funding. More often than not, the type of child abuse that is targeted is the abuse of a child by his/her parents or by other adults such as stepparents or mothers' boyfriends. For instance, a library search of the key words "peer abuse" yielded only six references; "child abuse" yielded 210 references from 1991 to 1993 alone, mainly parent related, and not a single one pertained to child abuse by age-mates. Most books on child-welfare policies fail to include peer abuse (e.g., Costin, Bell, & Downs, 1991). Currently, the primary focus of the literature on family and child development rests on the role played by parents in their children's lives. This unidirectional causality model still forms the core of the publications in the major psychology, psychiatry, sociology, and developmental journals despite decades of advances in psychology and sociology whereby children are studied as social actors, even affecting their parents (Bell & Harper, 1977; Rutter, 1982; Thomas & Chess, 1977), as "coproducers of their own development" (Belsky, Lerner, & Spanier, 1984; Bornstein, 1985; Lerner, 1982; Lerner & Busch-Rossnagel, 1981), as cocreators of their social environments (Corsaro & Eder, 1990; Morelli & Tronick, 1991, p. 111), and even as early as 1969, as socializers of their parents (Rheingold, 1969). These and other researchers direct our attention to the circular interactions between child effect and parental effect (Amato & Ochiltree, 1986; Ambert, 1992; Bradbury & Fincham, 1990; Patterson, 1986). The concepts of socialization and child development prevent us from focusing on the fact that children have important sociological attributes (Qvortrup, 1991) and perform social functions extending beyond their mere psychologization. Children have agency (Thorne, 1987) and, as Alanen (1990) points out, the triangle of childhood, family, and socialization, "takes place within accepted notions of the other two, so that we can rarely even imagine novel relations between the three components" (p. 15). However, contemporary developments on several fronts have allowed for the growing recognition of children's active roles and of the larger environment which ultimately has a great influence on children (Bronfenbrenner, 1987; McLanahan & Davis, 1989; Skolnick, 1978, p. 331; Small & Eastman, 1991). Part of this environment is constituted by peers who are already recognized as having a great impact on children (e.g., Peterson & Rollins, 1987; Rubin & Ross, 1982). The importance of peers, however, has been neglected from the position of policy. Children are currently being socialized to recognize, resist, and report child abuse perpetrated by adults, but there is no parallel effort made with regard to peer abuse. Peer abuse may be dismissed because it accords agency to children, rather than to adults only. It gives children a much more active role as social actors, taking children-as-abusers out of the usual purview of children-in-need-of-protection (Ennew, 1986). Peer abuse does not fall within the current paradigms guiding child-welfare professionals. These paradigms largely focus on the family as a target for treatment and policing (Donzelot, 1979), and represent an extension of traditional socialization and developmental theories emphasizing the maternal role and the effect of parents on their children. …