Bronagh's story

It all started when Bronagh was 13 or 14. A boy who used to go to her school added her as a contact on MSN after he left. Bronagh was surprised, as he hadn't liked her much and she hadn't really had anything to do with him. She thought maybe he wanted to catch up on news from his old school, so accepted his request. At first everything was fine, but then out of the blue he turned on her. He started saying nasty things about her and about her family, and it kept happening.

‘He would make sectarian comments,’ said Bronagh, ‘calling me a nasty name for a Catholic rather than using my name. He'd say horrible things about how I looked – I'm a redhead, and he'd say that being ginger is a disability. He called me fat and ugly, and I really started to take it to heart. He said I should want to kill myself. Girls go on about their weight and worry about not being pretty as it is, and then I had this boy saying all these awful things, so I started to think it must be true. I started to believe that I was all the things he called me and my self-confidence was really low.

‘I didn't talk to my family about it as the things he was saying about them were so hurtful too and I didn't even want to repeat them. He said my niece should never have been born, he said my parents should commit suicide for having a daughter like me, and he was abusive about my brother because he's gay.

‘I know my family would have been supportive, but I just didn't want them to know what was happening. I spoke to some of my friends, and they were shocked. I think one of them challenged him over MSN about what he was doing, and he blamed me. I logged back on and he showed me these red marks on his neck over the webcam, and said that he'd tried to hang himself because of what I'd said about him. Then I started to feel like it was all my fault. I brought it to an end by permanently blocking him from my MSN account.