It was great that they addressed this issue. Hopefully they do an episode for the treatment men get as well despite it not being as common; it would be nice to have both.

I say this because of personal experiences, one being back it my final year of highschool, a pretty important year. For a bit of context, my school offered some subjects that our sister school didn’t and vice versa, so we would travel between schools.

A girl I was friends with was beside her locker waiting for a new junior student to finish getting her things. The young girl was already going as quick as she could but apparently that wasn’t good enough for my friend who exclaimed, ‘fuck these year 8s are so damn annoying,’ whilst pushing this girl over causing her to drop her things everywhere. Despite us being close friends I didn’t ignore the bullying and told her that she shouldn’t treat people like that, especially this poor little year 8 student who has literally just started highschool. My friend didn’t like that I disagreed with her, especially in front of a lot other students, mainly from the lower year levels, and verbally abused me and avoided me for the rest of the day. The next morning at school a group of her girl friends came over to me all angry questioning me on ‘why am I such a shit person?’ and ‘how could I treat [friend’s name] like that?’ I was so confused, but it turns out my so-called friend was so furious that I called her out the day before that she spread rumours about me, including but not limited to me only wanting to be friends with her to ‘get in’. This wasn’t true at all, I genuinely just saw her as a good friend. I even invited her to my formal/prom night purely because she invited me to hers and kept hinting for months that she wanted to come to mine, despite me desperately wanting to invite someone I had a crush on for months. So as a result of this, all the people she was connected to at school looked at me like I wasn’t even human and wouldn’t even give me the time of day to hear me out. From then on I was pretty rattled and hated my lessons at her school, it made learning so much harder knowing I had to do it in a place where people viewed me as trash because of a false rumour started out of anger.