Bullied Tales of Torment, Identity, and Youth

In this examination of the ubiquitous practice of bullying among youth, compelling first person stories vividly convey the lived experience of peer torment and how it impacted the lives of five diverse young women. Author Keith Berry’s own autoethnographic narratives and analysis add important relational communication, methodological, and ethical dimensions to their accounts. The personal stories create an opening to understand how this form of physical and verbal violence shapes identities, relationships, communication, and the construction of meaning among a variety of youth. The layered narrative describes the practices constituting bullying and how youth work to cope with peer torment and its aftermath, largely focusing on identity construction and well being; addresses contemporary cyberbullying as well as other forms of relational aggression in many social contexts across race, gender, and sexual orientations; is written in a compelling way to be accessible to students in communication, education, psychology, social welfare, and other fields.