Respectme

At one of Susan’s meeting with Lisa (16), Lisa told her that since their last meeting she had fallen out with her group of friends and they had been bullying her really badly for the past week and she was getting frightened.  Susan pulled the car over into a car park and asked Lisa to tell her exactly what was going on. 

Lisa seemed to sense that Susan was serious and tried to retract some of what she was saying and play things down.  Lisa persisted with calm and gentle probing and found out that what had probably started as a relationship breakdown between friends had escalated into bullying behaviour.  Lisa seemed relieved to get it off her chest but was obviously becoming increasingly worried about what would happen if the girls found out that she had told on them.  Most of the bullying seemed to be going on outside of the school, in the community. 

Susan established that nothing physical had happened as yet and that most of the bullying seemed to involve text messaging and online bullying through Bebo (an online social networking site).  Susan encouraged Lisa to start saving the text messages without replying and to report the bullying online to Bebo.  They worked out a strategy for Lisa which involved staying off line for a few days and exploring other friendships with girls at school who she knew well.  Susan also got Lisa’s agreement to let her folks at home know what was going on so that they would be aware of the situation and to speak to someone at school so that they could keep an eye out for any bullying behaviour there.  They agreed to meet up in a few days time to see if things had calmed down a bit and work out what to do next.