DD confrontation in street, don't know how to react

[KarenR70]

Hi all, first time poster on mumsnet but I've found myself in a situation and am unsure of what to do.

My daughter (aged 16) was on her way to meet friends on Sunday when another girl (DD says she looked about the same age) sitting on a wall started shouting as DD passed, saying she needed to 'learn some respect'.
DD is very quiet and hates confrontation so ignored her. This girl then jumped down and began to follow DD, continuing to shout and act generally threatening, so acting in fear DD turned around and hit her, then ran back home.

This wasn't even at night, it was about 2pm. We live in a quiet area and DD says she didn't notice anybody else around at the time.

We're both very shaken up by the whole thing, and DD is scared that the other girl may report her for assault as she threw the only punch. I don't know the law surrounding things like this, could that happen? Does it count as self-defence if DD wasn't physically attacked, but was threatened?

I've tried to comfort my daughter but I just don't know what to say really :( Any support or advice would be greatly appreciated.

Yes technically it is assault, and it would probably be hard to argue self-defence, but without witnesses it would be one person's word against the other. The girl would also need to know where your DD lived etc. so hopefully it won't go any further.

I can understand that your daughter was frightened, but what on earth possessed her to hit out? You do need to sit down with her and stress that it wasn't a clever thing to do, and discuss other coping strategies if she ever finds herself in a similar situation. My DS1 threw a punch the day our dog died - someone tried to push him off his bike and unfortunately choose a bad day to do it! Although in his case he could probably have shown provocation I felt a bit sick all night in case we had some irate parents at the door but luckily we didn't. Although I felt sorry for him he got the strict "find another way to deal with things" talk as unfortunately these things can have consequences never imagined at the time.