To interfere with teenage silliness (bullying?)

[northlundunmum]

I saw an "incident" today between a group of teenage girls today (who I don't know at all) which made me uncomfortable... But not sure if I am overreacting...

My 4yo DD goes to an after school class where they also run a class for teenagers (unaccompanied by parents). While my DD was in her class three girls who all go to the same school (in uniform so prob 13-16yo?) were waiting for their class. Let's call them girl-with-glasses, older-girl and pretty-girl. At one point the three girls are in the adjacent room and pretty-girl takes an unflattering photograph of girl-with-glasses on girl-with-glasses's phone (willingly or not - it's not clear). Pretty-girl says she's going to post it, girl with glasses objects asking to see the picture and tries to grab her phone back. Pretty-girl will not relinquish the phone and there's a struggle. Older-girl restrains girl-with-glasses pulling her from behind. At this point the owner of the club (who is also running their class) comes downstairs. He sees the three girls still struggling together but doesn't bat an eyelid, just telling them it's time for class. Pretty-girl breaks free still with with girl-with-glasses's phone and runs off round the corner. I hear a clunk (sounds like a phone being dropped) and she reappears without the phone. Girl-with-glasses asks "where's my phone?", pretty girl replies "I don't have it", girl-with-glasses repeats "seriously, where's my phone?" Pretty girl repeats "I don't have it" and they disappear up to class - phone still "missing". A few moments later the owner-class-leader returns and I grab him and explain briefly what I saw. He says "don't worry, they do it all the time, they're really good friends and they've known each other for years" and goes off back up to class. At very least I'm left wondering - will she get the phone back? I had a look round for it and couldn't see it. I suspect it may have been dropped in a bin!

So my questions are:

• is this standard teenage behaviour and I shouldn't be concerned? At the moment I feel like if I heard that that had happened to my daughter I would go ballistic - but am I just being naïve?
• should I contact the school and tell them what I saw - which IMO amounts to bullying?
• I am certainly thinking I don't want my daughter to go there anymore as the ethos isn't right, although I have to say I've never seen anything negative as far as she's concerned. Am I over reacting?

My dd1's 14yo and I have similar between her and friend and it is just silliness which certainly isn't bullying. They do have a tendency to think that any picture of themselves is terrible, and react accordingly.
I wouldn't worry about it as a one off.

Without knowing the girls involved it's impossible to say whether it's friends messing about or whether it's 2 girls ganging up on another one. That behaviour could fit either circumstance.

If you see something similar happening again, maybe you could go over and ask "Is everything OK?" in a fairly friendly, neutral tone of voice. You could probably tell from the reaction of all the girls whether they were fooling around or whether one of them was genuinely upset by the behaviour of others.

You reported what you saw to appropriate adult - I don't think you need to do more than that.

Thanks both. Maybe I am over-reacting. I just didn't like the vibe - or the complacence of the adult in who's care they were supposed to be. Taking someone phone and dumping it somewhere they can't easily find it seems like unacceptable behaviour to me. But without knowing more about the girls or the situation it's hard to judge. It's true the girl who's phone it was didn't seem distraut enough to call on the teacher for help and the fact that it happened in public suggests the girls didn't seem to think anything was so wrong with thier behaviour. I'm just not sure I'd take a girls-will-be-girls approach if it was my daughter in that situation (as the "phone taker" or the "victim"). But I guess the perspective of the mother of a 4yo is quite different to the mother of a teenager!!

I don't like the sound of that. Joking and photo taking is fine, but hiding her phone and not telling her where it is is unpleasant. I think you were right to tell the class leader, hope he followed it up with them even though he thought it was probably friendly.