To the Editor:

Mike Males and Meda-Chesney Lind do not seem to understand that girls and women do not usually commit direct, male-style acts of violence. Therefore, the female-perpetrator rates for violent aggression have not increased.

Female-female aggression is indirect and involves slandering, taunting and ostracizing one vulnerable female target, which is what happened in the South Hadley, Mass., tragedy. Often, envy of a girl's beauty or brains, but just as often, the slightest difference (whether someone is new, an immigrant from another country, or school) will be seized upon by a female clique and treated as a high crime, an opportunity to tribally bond with one another — and as permission to torment the chosen outsider.

Phyllis Chesler

New York

The writer is the author of "Woman's Inhumanity to Woman."