“If she thinks she is so special, beat her”
This paper examines gendered violence between students in the school environment and the role it plays in adolescent identity development. In line with current research in this field, our study reveals that students act to socialize one another into a very constraining system of reciprocal controls that both constructs and supports a hierarchical and heteronormative organization of the sexes. Gendered peer violence, like the majority of daily interactions between students, restricts girls to a gendered order of domination. Despite their greater numbers and their academic success, girls find themselves marginalized within boy-centered peer groups. While an idealized egalitarian norm structures institutional discourse, adults in the school tend to support the development of gendered norms, meaning that girls may experience a concealed form of sexual harassment. The results are based on 39 semi-structured interviews with school directors as well as ethnographic observations of five schools with different socio-economic and geographic status over a school year.