Why Kids Who Post Asking If They’ll Be Bullied Often End Up Targeted: A Teacher’s Perspective
I was still picking at a half-eaten bag of cheddar Goldfish at my desk after school last month when a notification popped up from one of my student’s moms. She’d forwarded a screenshot from our 8th grade class’s unofficial Instagram group chat, where the new transfer student, Lila, had posted her first message 12 hours earlier, the night before her first day: “Hey everyone, be honest, am I gonna get bullied here? I got bullied at my old school :(”
The janitor had just mopped the hallway outside my room, and the sharp smell of lemon cleaner drifted through the cracked door. I’d known Lila and her mom were nervous about the mid-year switch; they’d come in a week early to tour, and Lila had barely spoken above a whisper the whole time. But I hadn’t thought to warn her about the unwritten rules of student-run online groups.
At first, a couple of the quieter, more empathetic girls in the front row replied with “No we don’t do that here dw” but 10 minutes later, two boys who sat in the back and spent most of class cracking dumb jokes jumped in. First “depends what you look like ngl” then “probably if you post stuff like this lmao”. Within an hour, someone made a fake account with Lila’s name, reposted her question with a caption calling her dramatic, and shared it to the bigger grade-wide chat. By the time I got the screenshot, almost 100 kids had liked it.
I pulled Lila into my room before first bell the next morning, her hood pulled tight over her hair, her backpack strap digging into her shoulder. When I showed her the screenshot, she just stared at her scuffed sneakers and said, “I thought if I was honest upfront, they wouldn’t think I was weird. I was so scared I couldn’t sleep, so I just asked.” I got admin to take the fake post down, we talked to the boys involved and gave them detentions, but the damage was done. For the next three weeks, kids snickered when she walked down the hallway.
This isn’t the first time I’ve seen this play out. In the last two years alone, I’ve had three new students join mid-year or at the start of the semester, post this exact question in a student-run group chat, and end up targeted exactly like they feared they would. It’s easy to write this off as kids just being cruel, or the kid being over-anxious, but that’s not what’s going on here. Teen social groups online run on unwritten scripts that most adults don’t notice. When you walk into a new group as an outsider, your first post is how you tell people who you are. If your first message is that you expect to be bullied, you’ve already given everyone their role. You’re telling the group that bullying you is an acceptable thing to do, because you already think it’s going to happen. Most of the time, it’s not that kids are actively evil; most don’t even think of it as real bullying at first, just a dumb joke that the new kid already set up.
After the Lila incident, I started talking about this dynamic explicitly with parents of incoming transfers, and I give them a couple of concrete things to try that don’t take much time at all. First, if your kid is nervous about joining a new chat, don’t just tell them “don’t be scared” or “don’t post that”. Sit down with them and draft two or three low-stakes, neutral opening posts that give other people something helpful to respond to. Good options are “Hey, I’m new, does anyone have the supply list for 3rd period? I can’t find it” or “Any recommendations for good lunch spots in the cafeteria?” or even something tied to a common interest, like “Anyone else going to the fall dance next week?” These posts don’t signal vulnerability; they give other kids a chance to be helpful, which makes it way easier to make a good first impression. When Lila joined the school’s art club chat a couple weeks later, her mom helped her draft a post: “I just got into watercolor and I can’t stop messing up my sky backgrounds, any tips?” She got three replies within five minutes from other kids who did art, and one of them asked her to sit with them at lunch the next day.
For teachers, there’s an easy low-effort adjustment too: if you know a new student is joining, ask their permission to post a quick intro for them in the group chat before they have to say anything. Something simple like “Hey everyone, this is Lila, she joins our class tomorrow and loves drawing, so come say hi if you’re into art too.” That sets a positive frame for the new kid before they have to navigate introducing themselves, and it takes the pressure off them to make that first move.
Lila still doesn’t post much in the big class chat. She eats lunch with the art club kids now, and she turned in a really good watercolor painting of our school’s oak tree for the spring art show last week. We still do a quick check-in every Friday when she walks in, just a nod and a “how’s it going?” that she knows she can stop and talk if she needs to. It’s not perfect, and there are still days kids whisper when she walks by. But this dynamic still surprises me, every time I see it. Most adults tell kids to be open about their fears, to be honest about what they’ve been through, and that’s good advice for a lot of spaces. But online teen groups don’t work that way. Sometimes, the fear you put out there is exactly what other people will run with. We can’t fix every cruel thing kids do, but we can help them write a different first line.
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