Lauren Paul, founder of the Kind Campaign, said 90 percent of the stories she hears while working in schools are of girls bullied by other girls. The California-based nonprofit launched a decade ago to focus on “girl against girl” bullying through free educational programming that reaches about 300 schools a year.

Paul recalls meeting one girl who was obsessive about her social media accounts because a group of girls excluded her if she did not get enough likes or follows in any given week. She went so far as to painstakingly create fake profiles just to meet her quota.

“Most of the time — if not almost all the time — it’s about what’s going on with other girls,” Paul said. “It’s this longing to be accepted by their female peers specifically and feeling broken if they don’t.”

Though Paul primarily hosts assemblies and workshop exercises at middle and high schools, she said there’s been more demand to help younger and older students in recent years. The Kind Campaign has gotten more requests for elementary school presentations and now also regularly gets called to universities to work with sororities.

The latest national data may spark new conversations about “Mean Girls” behavior, Joffe said, referring to 2004 movie starring Lindsay Lohan.

“It’s a school issue, but it’s just a reflection of broader societal issues,” Joffe said. “I’m not sure schools have any better answer than say, the Twitter company or Facebook. They’re also trying to find answers to what to do about abuses online.”

Some tech companies also are taking a stab at what seems like an intractable problem.

Instagram unveiled its latest feature this month that uses artificial intelligence to try to stop abuse. Users typing a potentially offensive comment on a photo or video will get a notification that reads: “Are you sure you want to post this?”

Many school districts, meanwhile, are beefing up social-emotional learning curriculum beyond just teaching children how to share and express their feelings in the early grades.

That’s something Manuela Slye, a Seattle mother with three teenagers, says is a must to prevent cyberbullying. The president of the Seattle Council Parent Teacher Student Association called on her school district to expand its “soft skills” lessons through high school, as is done in a neighboring school district.

Seattle Public Schools is working to expand such offerings, though a district spokesman said there hasn’t been a noted rise in cyberbullying among its students.

“There needs to be social-emotional development teaching before it goes to cyberbullying, before it goes to doing something online and anonymously, and before you have a problem with someone,” Slye said