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Diary of Despair
She was one of the "in" crowd - and she loved it. Rebecca Willers would swan around the school as if she owned the place, sniggering along with the rest when the gang picked on and taunted the more vulnerable pupils.
But it was no laughing matter when they viciously turned on her, beating her so badly she spent almost a week in hospital.
From then on, the Essex schoolgirl found herself the target of a campaign of hate, suffering dozens of threatening phone calls each night and a non-stop barrage of abusive text messages.
Rebecca's life at the Aveley School in Thurrock turned into a living hell. Struggling to cop, she wrote about her terror and misery in a diary - and here we publish vivid excerpts from it on day two of the daily mirror's anti bulling campaign, Bulling: You Can Stop It.
Gangs of up to 30 kids wold gather outside the house Rebecca, now 14 shares with her mother and two younger sisters and scream foul abuse. Her tormentors even kept up their cruel campaign on Christmas Day.
They had turned on her after she was accused of starting a rumour that one of the biggest bullies in the gang had slept with her boyfriend.
"To this day I swear I never said that," says Rebecca. "But when I was walking out of school that afternoon she came up behind me with two other girls, pulled me to the floor and started kicking me in the stomach.
"The other girls took my bag, took money out of it, and took my phone. It was literally 10ft outside school. Adults were parked outside - there were loads and loads of peple standing around and no one did anything. I managed to get up and because they thought I was going to fight back two of them pushed me through a big 6ft fence into a back garden, knocking the fence down. I was lying in the garden and they kept kicking me in the face and stomach. "
Then one of them came in, grabbed my hair and tried to knee me in the face. As I moved, her knee got me underneath the chin and in the throat.
"It went on for a good five minutes, with them booting me anywhere they could find. They were having a good old go at it. At one point, when there was a big gang of people around me, one of them pulled down my top and my boobs were exposed and everything.
"Then the neighbour next door to the house came out and managed to pull them off."
Rebecca immediatlely saw a doctor, but it wasn't until the next day that the extent of her injuries became clear, as the harrowing first entry in her diary reveals. Driven to despair by months of bulling, she eventually wrote moving goodbye letters to her family and friends.
"Mum, I am sorry but I can't cope any more," she said. "You kept me going this far - I love you so much."
References to suicide pepper her diary. Luckily, Rebecca never took that final, fatal step. But she came close - as the scars on her wrists and legs from self-harm bear witness.
On the right (Next post for you guys) are extracts from her diary that chronicle the months of torment she suffered after the attack until she finally moved to a new school...
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2004-09-14, 11:58 AM
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