Just to add to the previous post: My daughter was very effective at standing up for other students who were being bullied, because then she felt that she had the clear moral authority to do that–just not so good at effectively standing up for herself when she was in the group being bullied. One young man was part of my daughter’s middle-school group of friends (all girls aside from him). Students in the year ahead teased the young man pretty badly about being “gay” because of he was part of their group, and not a male group. My daughter and her friends told the people who were teasing her male friend to stop, quite unequivocally. They didn’t stop. My daughter and a few of her friends spoke with someone in the school administration, who arranged to have two teachers on hand, near the lunch room where they could observe the teasing. It stopped after that. My spouse and I did not hear about this until it was over. My daughter and her friends were pretty egalitarian, so I won’t say that she was the “leader” in this set of actions; rather the leadership was shared equally among a few of the girls. I thought they handled the situation pretty well.