Unfiltered Story #280308

When I am 8 and a half, we immigrate to a new country. It takes me close to a year to become fluent in the new language. This story takes place in the first 1-2 months, when I essentially don’t understand a word yet.
To lift up my self-esteem a bit in this new intimidating alien environment, I stop wearing my hair in a plain ponytail, instead wetting and braiding it every night so I can wear it loose and wavy to school. I think it makes me look quite a bit prettier.
Within a week of me beginning wearing my hair that way, I start getting semi-regularly physically attacked by a rather creepy boy from my class. He comes up behind me seemingly out of nowhere in random places around the school, at unexpected times, grabs me and bodily holds me against him; pressing me against the floor, a wall, etc., and silently staring at me while I frantically struggle. Each time, it takes me several minutes to tear myself free and escape. Most of the time when this happens there are other students around, sometimes even a full crowded hallway. No one ever helps in any way; they just stand and watch like it’s great entertainment.
I become progressively more alarmed and frightened, but have no way to do anything like ask for help because I can’t speak their language, and I was never given any instruction by anyone at the school about what to do if I’m assaulted. The only way I can communicate with anyone at the school is via a classmate who was (unwillingly) assigned as my interpreter, but she only helps me with this strictly during lessons, when she’s forced to, and it’s clear she is aware of my being assaulted and is acting like this sort of bullying is an everyday, “business-as-normal” occurrence around here that you just have to put up with.
The last incident, after many weeks of such attacks, entails the creepy boy stalking and cornering me alone in one of the girls’ restrooms, and again bodily grabbing me to hold me tight against a wall, while pressing his whole body against me and intently staring at me nose to nose, breathing in my face. Again, it takes me a number of minutes of frantic struggling to escape his grasp and out of the bathroom. At this point I’m terrified for my life. Meanwhile, nobody at the school in any position of authority seems to have noticed anything amiss.
Finally, in desperation, I ask my mother for help. We have a poor relationship and she cares very little for my well-being as long as I still return from school more-or-less alive every day. I have to beg and plead with her for a really long time to even take me seriously, and frame the attacks I’m being subjected to as if they’re an insult against our entire family in order to get her to care enough to agree to help.
Her solution: come to school with me in the morning, have me point out the boy to her, and then proceed to grab him forcefully by the ear and scream threats at him for a good ten minutes (in a language he doesn’t understand) while yanking him around. Meanwhile a ton of kids in the hallway are standing around staring at this scene in fascination. She finally finished screaming at him to her heart’s content, and then just left.
What was the school’s response you wonder? Our class teacher and principal decided that the best way to address this problem was to berate me (through my assigned “interpreter”) about what my MOTHER did. Apparently, I “ought to have known” (god only knows *how*) that people in THIS country don’t BEHAVE THIS WAY. I suppose they meant that THEIR country and THEIR school is more “civilized” than where I came from, though even decades later I fail to see how, considering all of what happened. They declared that I ought to have known all along that the correct thing to do was to go to them to complain about the creepy boy, ignoring that no one at the school ever told me anything about this procedure before, and I was from a *very different* country and culture *and* couldn’t speak a word to them. It didn’t matter in the end anyway, as they were utterly uninterested in anything I had to say in response in any case.
The boy finally stopped attacking me and left me alone, at least. I ended up deciding to quit wearing my hair in any similarly styled way for many years afterwards. Various incidents of verbal and physical bullying & assault from many of the “civilized” students there continued for the entire rest of the six years we lived in that country.