Hayley Jameson heard snickers and fake vomiting noises behind her as she walked down the halls.
“I would hear people saying things at me behind my back,” Jameson says. “My confidence level dropped. I didn’t want to interact with anyone or see anyone.”
Grant was where Jameson once socialized with friends. It became the place where she felt victimized and alone. Her experiences typify the kind of bullying that runs rampant in middle and high schools.
In middle school, experts say girls take on roles when it comes to bullying. There is the queen bee, the bully, the bystander and the target. The roles change constantly because people are learning who they are, and in high school it can get worse.
Jameson was used to being the target. In middle school, the social climate shuffled daily beneath her feet. “Middle school seemed like a lot of lost people to me,” she recalls. “One day you have a best friend and the next day she isn’t your friend anymore. It was awful.”
As the girls matured, Jameson says the girl-on-girl abuse eventually stopped. “I feel like I have grown a lot since then,”she says.
When she entered high school, she felt relieved that the bullying was over. She met a whole new group of friends and they had a lot of freedom. But after a while, she found her new friends weren’t reliable. She found out the hard way after getting into an argument with one of them. “It was just very weird, and then poof! All of my friends were gone because of an incident that happened with a few of them,” she recalls.
The former friends gossiped about her. They ignored her. And she was met by glares at school. This time, Jameson chose to remove herself. “I would just go to class, go to dance and go home,” she says. She refused to be a victim.
Jameson eventually sought support from a counselor and a trusted teacher, improved her grades and avoided her tormentors. “If you let the bullies know you’re vulnerable,” Jameson says, “they’ll hurt you more. Nobody deserves to get bullied. In the end, the bullies are the ones who look bad.”
