The photo of a penis through a video game and a repeated “you’re horrible”: this is how bullying affects a girl

It’s an afternoon in 2013, Victoria is in her new home immersed in a online video game for kids. AT 8 yearsshe has just moved to San Martín de los Andes with her parents and her sister, and although she was excited because she was going to experience snow, the only thing she feels now is loneliness.

In Buenos Aires, his friends from primary school, his grandparents, stayed. She is immersed in this virtual world, supposed to interact with other boys and girls of her age, when a link arrives. Victoria opens it. It’s a picture of a penis.

He doesn’t tell anyone and quickly turns into a spinning hamster in what he now calls “a vicious circle”. The less his new third-year classmates talk to him, the more convinced he becomes that in this online game, he belongs in a group. So she gets used to living with it, to being petrified at first but then staying there, turning.

Following? An instruction to learn how to masturbateeg And more, much more.

This is the story of victoria ali, who is now 18 years old. Victoria suffered grooming from 8 years old (sexual harassment of a girl by an adult via the Internet). In preadolescence and in the vulnerable state I was in, added the intimidation (harassment at school, face to face, but also via their social networks). It’s the first time he’s said it publicly, perhaps his way of warning of the enormous damage he can cause.

a girl

It was 10 years ago; Victoria’s father, who was a pilot for Aerolíneas Argentinas, had just retired and her mother was starting a business. The idea was to leave Villa Luzuriaga, west of the province of Buenos Aires, for Patagonia. looking, not only for a new economic activity, but for a safer place to raise two girls aged 8 and almost 10.

There was something about the spirit of the town that Victoria initially found wonderful: “Suddenly I went out onto the patio and there were neighbors my age,” she says. GlobeLiveMedia. This is how the sisters befriended a girl who once showed them the online games she was playing.

“I started playing one called Gaturro’s worldshe continues, referring to a multiplayer online game based on the character of the cat. “Multiplayer” are games that are practiced by several people, who can compete against each other or be part of a team that must meet to accomplish a mission.

“Everything I’m going to tell you has stayed with me, I was able to say it recently seven years later, when it was already very bad,” he continues. “There are parts that I don’t remember very well, I think my mind numbs me with certain things to protect me.”

With what he remembers, it is enough all the same: “There was someone who wrote to me everything he would do to me. Sexually speaking I say; I was 8 years old. I had adult people sending me inappropriate photos, like photos of the male member, or told me how to masturbate, For example. In this case, I was already 9 years old, because all this went on for many years.

Victoria was neat -an adult who uses a false identity to create a bond of trust and threaten the sexual integrity of a girl-. and got caught. “As I couldn’t fit in at school, I took refuge there. I was innocent, but I knew something was wrong. I believed that it was my fault So I didn’t tell anyone.”

He did not tell his sister – “that many years later she told me something similar had happened to her” -; nor to the new neighbor. “And I guess the same thing must have happened to this girl because she was 10, 11, and 25-year-old men were video calling her.”

It was not a casual thing because it started at 8 years old and it continued. In fact, when Victoria was 12 al grooming another form of harassment was added.

You may be interested: Argentina is the second country with the most cases of cyberbullying of children in Latin America

It was in 2017, many teenagers dreamed of being youtubers “And I’ve always gotten on very well with digital art. I don’t know how but I managed to convince my parents to let me set up a YouTube channel, ”he recalls.

“I was overjoyed and on the first day of school I told everyone that I had created a channel. I thought it was going to be fun, that I was going to make videos with my friends, that my classmates were going to like me better and that I was finally going to be able to fit in. I never thought they were going to use it for anything bad.”

I was still in seventh grade when he received an anonymous message on the channel. “There was another message below but with the name of a colleague. we said ‘pity’, the other said ‘You are awful’; That’s how it started.”

Bullying has moved from the networks to the school, from the school to the networks, and it has taken different forms. “Once I was on my bench and I heard my colleagues behind me laughing and saying my name. Then they approached me and said ‘what you do on YouTube is shit ‘”.

Victoria told the teachers, but the way they approached her made her feel even worse. “They held a closed meeting in the classroom, sat us all down and said ‘they’re writing this to Victoria, this and that’. I felt very singled out, because whoever didn’t know eventually found out, it started to spread for other courses, and more and more comments were piling up on my YouTube channel.

If on the channel they wrote “I’m jealous“, when I arrived at school, this happened: “Once I was in the yard and suddenly a classmate came up to me and said ‘you are horrible, your nose is the size of a NASA rocket. I told a teacher about it, who picked him up and ordered him to apologize to me. The boy said to me: ‘Well, I’m sorry, but anyway everything I said is true: you are horrible’”.

It was the first time Victoria’s parents had to take her out. of the College. The sexual harassment through online gambling continued and Victoria could no longer hide her anguish. He came home and screamed, slammed doors, cried desperately.

“My parents knew what was happening to me at school but not what was happening in the video game, they didn’t know what to do anymore.”

The “bulinero” students continued with impunity: “They started uploading photos from my Instagram in which I was wearing a top and they created fake profiles where they made a circle on my belly, another on my nose and wrote “fat” next to it. ‘, ‘the long nose'”, he lists.

Victoria slowly started to believe it: “Before the bullying, I had never had self-esteem issues, I looked good, I felt good the way I was, but these comments started to make me feel very anxious. I thought, ‘Am I really fat?’, ‘Should I get my nose done?’ “.

Victoria Survived to that seventh year and tore the secondary with the idea of ​​starting over, of finally having friends. “But the harassment in the networks continued, and then I realized that many of my colleagues were new to me, but they already knew me. They were children from other schools who had also joined the comments.

The anguish had accumulated so much that she became more and more cornered: “At this time, the series was created 13 reasons why“, remember. A series that showed the suicide of a teenager who had been sexually abused at a school party. “I saw it and it hurt me a lot. I thought, ‘If I go through this, am I going to end up like this girl?’ »

the implosion

Several marches had already taken place in the country Not one less when Victoria began to pay attention to some demands of the feminist movement.

“I was 13 years old, I felt terrible anguish, but childhood has been erased. I needed to know why I felt like this but I couldn’t put it into words. The feminist movement helped me to see that what had happened to me was a molestation, that it was something serious and that I was normalizing it”.

Victoria spent several more years “hide it” until the pandemic hits and, in confinement, the symptoms increase. Something imploded.

And I started having a obsessive compulsive disorder”, account: the so-called TOC. He would spend entire sleepless nights fixing things non-stop: fixing was the compulsion; the obsessive thought was “if i don’t do this i will hurt my parents, or myself, horrible but very intrusive thoughts of things i would never do”.

They offered to go to a psychologist“but I was in denial, I thought ‘if I’m going to find out that I’ve been abused’. Until I couldn’t take it anymore, my life was already a mess. As I slept barely waking up anytime I was totally abandoned I started thinking ‘if I don’t get this stuff that happened to me on the outside out, it’s gonna rot inside’” .

Victoria was able to tell her mother in the middle of a panic attack“when I felt like I was going to die, literally. I was out of breath, I was very restless, I couldn’t walk.”

it was so started psychological treatment and psychiatric medication which, little by little, made him feel better. The harassment had still left its mark. Victoria had to leave school without completing her studies and went through high school without friends. Even today, he looks in the mirror with insecurity and the YouTube channel no longer exists: “My dream has literally collapsed.”

However, she is no longer a victim: Considering that bullying is one of the greatest risk factors for teen suicide, Victoria is a survivor.

“I wish I hadn’t gone through all of this, but it’s as true as made me stronger“, says goodbye. This strength has now allowed him to use his story in two ways. On the one hand, to give this interview, to speak out, to be read by bullies and bullies, fathers, mothers, teachers, to show THE “red flags”.

On the other, add it to its 3D animation capability and create two filters that Instagram has approved and added so that everyone can use them. One is a monitor that replaces a head and throws “error”, “error”, “error”. The other is a head that blooms when watered, his way of reminding the world that he is Mental Health it is part of health.

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