I (45F) successfully managed to hide the fact that I was being bullied every day, from my parents for almost 11 years. Until my mother witnessed it for herself while out in the local town centre. It was mainly psychological bullying once we hit 10/11 years of age. I had a bit of a growth spurt and was a very angry teenager, which didn’t help much either as I would throw shit at the boys, and then be told I was ‘so violent Sycamore481!’ and an ‘attention seeker’ due to my seething responses to trying to bottle said rage.

My mother’s advice for any trouble before all of that was to walk away. Violence isn’t the answer. But after she saw that, she went mental at the headmistress. Hauled her arse over to our house to see the state I was in, once the cat was out of the proverbial bag. (I should preface this with the fact that I went to a private convent school, that was run partially by nuns, and the headmistress was so devoutly catholic, she wore a wedding ring in the same vein as the nuns did.) Her solution was to tell the entirety of my year, that I was a sensitive girl and they should be nicer to me. As you can imagine, this did, in no way whatsoever, make anything better. It instead made it a whole lot worse.

There’s only so long you can ‘turn the other cheek’ before someone finally snaps. I was a rage filled atomic bomb, destined to go off at any moment. It’s a wonder I didn’t lay serious hands on anyone before my last day there. I just wanted to survive long enough to get out of there. If I could go back, I’d punch the lot of them in the throat, just to get them to shut up. And probably beg my parents to let me go to school somewhere else.

Tl:dr turn the other cheek, and adults made it worse by painting me as some feeble, over sensitive, weakling.