Cyber-bullying: Lola's long road to reconstruction
Audio 02:35
Cyber-harassment affects more than one in 10 young people in France.
(illustrative image) © iStock / Tero Vesalainen
By: Lucie Bouteloup
7 mins
Cyber-harassment is a scourge that affects more than one in 10 young people in France. Main targets of these attacks: young girls often aged between 15 and 17 years.
Publication without consent of photos, videos, but also false rumors of a pornographic nature… Acts which can have serious consequences for the victims.
Testimony of one of them.
Publicity
"
Every day, I received new messages from people I had known in college or not, on Facebook, on Instagram, who insulted me like a bitch, a bitch, a sow ...
" Dark-haired, smoky eyes, the slender silhouette and the assertive look, Lola is today a pretty young girl of 21 years old.
At the material time, she was 15. It was summer, she had just finished college and met her first great love.
Very quickly, the fairy tale turns into a nightmare.
“
He's the first one I had sex with.
Everything that happened in our bed was reported to people from college and therefore from my future high school.
He told everything in great detail, clearly, saying that I was a whore, when it was something very intimate for me and I was a very shy person.
At the time, it hurts a lot
, ”remembers Lola.
► Also listen: Social networks, protect yourself from harassment and addiction
From the group of friends to the group of executioners
The rumor spreads among his group of friends like wildfire.
And as soon as it is broadcast on social networks, Lola loses her footing.
When he returned to high school, the fall was dizzying.
“
When you have a group of friends who, in the end, turns out not to be a group of friends, but a group of executioners, it's already complicated to manage.
And when we arrive in a new establishment and we say to
ourselves
“
it's a new life which begins, it will be fine
” and that in the end, people know us by our reputation and not our real personality, so I fell. in depression,
”she confides.
Cocaine, ketamine and antidepressants then become for Lola the solution to escape a reality too hard to face.
In 6 months, she lost more than 25 kg, and she narrowly escaped the overdose.
Yet that is not enough.
“
We feel so empty, we no longer exist.
Hurting yourself is a way of feeling that you exist.
It's going to be scarification, hitting, self-strangling, cutting off the flow of blood in a hand, a leg.
It makes it possible to concretize his pain and his depression and to make it more concrete
”, admits the young woman.
A long work of reconstruction
Devastated, she ends up confiding in her parents who change her high school.
Then begins a long work of reconstruction.
“
What was hard was convincing myself that I was more than they said I was.
It took a very long time, it's true that the pain remains,
”says Lola.
Then she adds: “
Also, for two years, I disappeared from social networks.
And the fact of having simple relationships with people, without this need to appear, that made me really relativize.
I realized that it was a lot of images for very little content in fact.
"
According to a study by the association e-Enfance
, which campaigns for the protection of minors on the internet, in 2020, young girls represented nearly 60% of victims of online violence.
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