My experience…

I remember in year 5 in primary school, there was a (another race) girl who used to bully a lot of people within the year group at the time. She’d push people over for no reason, break into fights with boys, make snide remarks at other kids and was just a bully in general.

One day she was picking on one of my friends, so much so that it caused a disagreement within our friendship group (3 girls all of us black + mixed race) including myself. We were all sick and tired of the constant behaviour being displayed to everyone and the teachers not acting on it. So I decided that I was going to confront her and tell her the truth about how we all feel about her and her bullying. 

I told her that the reason a lot of the other children don’t want to hang out with her is because she is a bully and not a nice person to be around. This of course being the first time she ever received a reality check in her life, didn’t know how to react. So she threw her duffle bag at me, which hit my face. But I didn't react to it as I knew if the situation escalated i'd probably get the blame.

When the teachers called me and my 3 other classmates/friends into a meeting to discuss the situation, we thought the teacher would have told us that they’ve spoken to her about her behaviour. But instead, they were telling us that they will be sending letters home to our parents as we were bullying HER! A complete plot twist.

When we asked why were we being labelled as bullies when she’s bullying the whole year group, their excuse was that she was going through a lot outside of school which caused her to behave differently. That we should know better. 

But we were all going through personal problems outside of school and why wasn’t we afforded the same protection or innocence in the matter. Instead, we had to deal with explaining to our parents why we received letters from the school that the four of us were bullying one girl.