My view: Stephanie Smith

KATE Middleton’s decision to ask her wedding guests to donate to an anti-bullying charity has raised eyebrows and sent tabloid reporters scurrying off to her old boarding schools, presumably in the hope of identifying some nasty former school girls who might have made life a misery for “our Kate”.

No-one has managed to dig up anything terribly shocking so far, but the investigations and speculations have lifted the lid yet again on the unpleasant world of schoolgirl bullying, with suggestions that Kate might have been picked upon at one school because she was a day girl instead of a boarder, and because she was fairly meek and quiet. Friends have denied more lurid suggestions of bullying, and Susan Cameron, the former headmistress of Downe House, a school Kate attended for just two terms when she was 13, says she cannot recall any terrible incidents, adding: “The term ‘bullying’ these days can be used to include a situation when someone isn’t accepted or doesn’t feel accepted. Sadly it is a problem which is common to all of us growing up and we have to learn how to deal with it.” I suspect there are many teachers who would echo those words, and are of the opinion that bullying has become a term used a little too frequently these days to describe what is really just girls being girls.

Because girls can be very mean to each other. They say horrible things and have nasty fall-outs, but it all blows over and, anyway, it’s all part of life. Except sometimes it doesn’t blow over. Like many parents, I know that the worst bullying among girls takes place at primary school, where some nine and ten-year-old girls are shockingly cruel, able to identify, ostracise and isolate one of their peers with terrifying effectiveness and callousness. All it takes is one Queen Bee to single out the victim, instigate the campaign and then keep it running, with whispered words of encouragement, sometimes for years, so that the victim child cannot remember a time when she wasn’t routinely referred to as a piece of dog-dirt, or had vile lies spread about her, or was reported to teachers for made-up misdemeanours.

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These little girls are forced to get used to a school society in which they are an outsider, not allowed to have friends or even to laugh, and the effect this can have on their self-esteem, social skills and education can be devastating.

Parents look on helplessly, knowing that something is not right but not able to pinpoint it, especially when a child is too ashamed to admit that she is being ostracised.

Not being accepted by your peers at school is a horribly damaging form of bullying. It needs to be taken seriously by all teachers, who need more training in spotting and stopping it. Girls will be girls, but it’s time we stopped allowing them to be psychologically-vicious tormentors, and Kate Middleton deserves praise for highlighting the issue with her campaign support.

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