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It started, as is so often does with girls, with a whispering campaign.
The gossiping was endless.
“Everything I seemed to do was something to talk about. The girls would nudge each other and say: ‘Shhhh, Amelia* is there’.”
School felt like a popularity contest.
Amelia was asked to name the three prettiest girls in year 7.
When she shrugged, and said she thought everyone was pretty, she was ostracised for not playing the game.
The girls would glare at her; Amelia calls it the death stare.
Amelia was asked why she didn’t wear bike shorts under her school uniform.
They would mock her laugh.
It was, Amelia’s mother says, like living the film Mean Girls.
“There was this culture of nastiness that is endemic in a group of toxic girls.”
A delegation of girls told a teacher that Amelia was being bullied.
Amelia worried this would make things worse.
She said she didn’t want any action taken.
However the teacher decided to stage “The Intervention”.
Amelia and her main antagonist were brought together to discuss the problem.
But then the teacher’s mobile rang and she left the room, leaving Amelia and the bully alone together. “I was just sitting there painfully,” Amelia says.
As she had feared, things got worse. One afternoon four girls simultaneously blocked her on Instagram.
Another day a group of 10 girls surrounded her locker, blocking her exit. She was shoved on a train station.
Amelia started hiding in the library at lunchtimes. “It was just really bad when I was on my own all the time.” Continue reading
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