I have the same question. While there were fights between some girls in the high school I went to, all the abuse I dealt with was entirely verbal/social.
No one ever tried to lay a hand on me, so if I'd started anything, it would've been me looking like the 'bad guy'. And somewhere along the way I'd already internalized that as a 'good girl' disappointing authority was the worst thing I could possibly do.
I tried ignoring. I tried preemptively mocking myself to take the wind out of their sails. Nothing really stopped it. I got really lucky that my high school had a surprisingly large 'smart kid' group (6 National Merit scholars in my graduating class of 330) and eventually I was able to keep a large enough peer group to just not have to interact with most of the kids that bullied me.
But despite my small close circle of friends, I still graduated high school feeling like an outcast. Our entire AP history class once deemed me a 'neo-nazi' because I made a comment about the biased language in some video we watched. We had studied rhetoric only a few weeks before in English, and I was wondering why the video seemed to pulling so many of the tricks we'd just learned about in order to make the holocaust look like a bad thing. It seemed unnecessary (in my innocent mind I was thinking, 'Aren't the raw facts enough to convince anyone?').
My one offhand comment (literally just the words, 'That video sure used a lot of biased language.') turned into a full-scale mocking by everyone in the classroom except my two friends (who stayed silent). The teacher never actually joined in the mocking, but he stood by while it happened, encouraged the 'debate' to last longer, and even laughed at some of the hurtful comments made to me by the other students.
No one ever tried to lay a hand on me, so if I'd started anything, it would've been me looking like the 'bad guy'. And somewhere along the way I'd already internalized that as a 'good girl' disappointing authority was the worst thing I could possibly do.
I tried ignoring. I tried preemptively mocking myself to take the wind out of their sails. Nothing really stopped it. I got really lucky that my high school had a surprisingly large 'smart kid' group (6 National Merit scholars in my graduating class of 330) and eventually I was able to keep a large enough peer group to just not have to interact with most of the kids that bullied me.
But despite my small close circle of friends, I still graduated high school feeling like an outcast. Our entire AP history class once deemed me a 'neo-nazi' because I made a comment about the biased language in some video we watched. We had studied rhetoric only a few weeks before in English, and I was wondering why the video seemed to pulling so many of the tricks we'd just learned about in order to make the holocaust look like a bad thing. It seemed unnecessary (in my innocent mind I was thinking, 'Aren't the raw facts enough to convince anyone?').
My one offhand comment (literally just the words, 'That video sure used a lot of biased language.') turned into a full-scale mocking by everyone in the classroom except my two friends (who stayed silent). The teacher never actually joined in the mocking, but he stood by while it happened, encouraged the 'debate' to last longer, and even laughed at some of the hurtful comments made to me by the other students.