Izzy
Dix, a gifted pupil who had ambitions to go to Oxford University, took her own
life after complaining she could no longer cope with being bullied, both at
school and online
The
irony of Izzy Dix’s posthumous popularity isn’t lost on her grieving mother.
Her schoolmates flocked to the 14-year-old’s memorial service last month.
Tearful teenagers lined the route, lit candles, and released balloons that
streaked the sky with colour. ‘There was actually an issue about how many
youngsters to expect,’ admits her 45-year-old mum Gabbi. ‘We knew some pupils
from her school wanted to come, but then we discovered that kids from other
schools were sending out plus-one invitations online, treating it like an
event. That was stopped. There were still lots of young people, though.’ The presence of her daughter’s true friends
provided ‘much, much comfort’, Gabbi admits. But her feelings about some of the
other attendees are more ambivalent. For Izzy, a gifted pupil who had ambitions
to go to Oxford University, had taken her own life after complaining she could
no longer cope with being bullied, both at school and online. Not long before
her suicide, she wrote a heartbreaking poem about her ordeal.
She
called it I Give Up, and it reads:
‘They begin to tell me that nobody wants me there. They tell
me to leave and that I am not wanted.’ Devastatingly, it concludes: ‘Another
piece of me chiselled away by their cruel remarks and perceptions. I give up.’ Many, if not all, of the youngsters present at the service
would have been aware of Izzy’s torment. She had fled a Spanish lesson in tears
the day before her death when the jibes and sniggers — ‘the usual stuff’, says
her mother, bitterly — got too much. Some
of those who arrived to mourn her were directly implicated in the bullying,
says Gabbi. One was a leading perpetrator. ‘Some of the bullies stayed
away from the funeral; some didn’t,’ she says. ‘This particular girl was a
ringleader, yet she was one of the first people to step forward to hug me. I was in too much of a
state to do anything other than accept it.’It is only six weeks since Izzy died, and Gabbi’s grief is
as raw as it gets. She was a single mother; Izzy was her only child. She
was ‘my daughter, my best friend, my everything’, says Gabbi. She
asks to do this interview in St Albans, where her own mother lives. It later
transpires she has not been back to the family home in Devon since the night
she ran from it, hysterical, after finding Izzy’s body. Every item of furniture has been given to the charity shop
Izzy used to work in (‘it supports teenagers in need. We never knew how apt
that would be’). Their other possessions are in storage, save for Izzy’s diary,
which was taken by the police as evidence. Izzy’s grandmother tells me that
Gabbi hasn’t been alone since Izzy died; she even sleeps in her mother’s bed.
At night, she wakes up screaming ‘leave my baby alone’. But Gabbi’s anger is as strong as her devastation, hence her
insistence on going public with Izzy’s story. In the weeks since Izzy’s death, some of her classmates —
‘not the ring-leaders but the ones who joined in the ganging-up, which I
actually find more difficult
to
forgive’ — have attempted to apologise, but this has only added to Gabbi’s
pain. She says: ‘One girl got in touch to say she was sorry if their silly
jokes had led to this. Silly jokes? It wasn’t silly jokes. It was sustained,
relentless, cruel bullying, and she could not escape it. ‘Izzy would come home and sob in my arms. They
called her “ugly”, “freak”, “frigid”. If she put her hands up in class, she’d
be labelled a “swot” and they’d snigger at her, or make crude comments.
‘They’d
exclude her from events, tell her to go home, she wasn’t wanted. They’d turn
their backs on her, literally. ‘When she did come home, it didn’t stop, because
it doesn’t, these days. They name-called her by text, then online. She’d log
onto Facebook and get abuse. Then onto that awful site Ask.fm [a website in
which users post anonymous comments on each other's profiles], and be subjected
to filth.
Not long before her suicide, Izzy
wrote a heartbreaking poem about her ordeal. She called it I Give Up
‘Some people will say, “Oh that’s
just teenagers today”, but I don’t accept that. It was more than we should
expect any teenager to cope with, and in the end my daughter couldn’t.’Gabbi is
angry not just at the bullies and their ‘complete lack of compassion and
humanity’, but at the teachers at Izzy’s school. Some ‘who should have acted
and didn’t’ were even at the service, she says.
She reveals that while Izzy ‘adored’
many of her teachers, they failed to tackle the bullies, even though they’d
been told what was going on.
Izzy with her mother, Gabbi, who
said she was 'my daughter, my best friend, my everything'
Gabbi
claims she had contacted the school, Brixham College, at least 15 times in the
months before her daughter died, complaining about the name-calling, teasing
and the ostracising. ‘But every time I
rang, I felt I was an irritation. You could hear it in their voices, as if they
were rolling their eyes and going, “Oh, not her again.” ’ Gabbi, who was a teacher herself, so is more aware of
anti-bullying responsibilities in education than most, last phoned to discuss
the problem on September 16 — the day before Izzy died. She had come home in a
terrible state, claiming she had been told off for bursting into tears in
class.
‘It beggars belief,’ she says. ‘My
daughter gets upset in class because she is being bullied — and she is
the one who gets into trouble? I got through to the headmaster himself
that afternoon and pleaded with him, yet again, to do something. ‘If he couldn’t get the ringleader out of that
class, which he’d promised to do previously, could he at least bring her
parents in to discuss it? He said he couldn’t because he had “no evidence”.
Well, the next day my daughter hanged herself. How much evidence did he
need?’There has not yet been an inquest into Izzy’s death, so there is no proof
that she took her own life because of bullying, and perhaps there never will
be. Suicides are rarely that simple. Yet you can’t read I Give Up, the poem she
wrote, without seeing it as a glaring cry for help. Gabbi read it just weeks
before Izzy died. She says: ‘It is my biggest regret that I didn’t heed the
alarm bells. ‘I knew she was distressed. She kept saying she couldn’t take it
any more. But not once did I consider that she would do what she did. It sounds
so stupid now, but in my head I thought she wasn’t quite at breaking point
because her grades hadn’t slipped at school. She was a star pupil until the day
she died.’
One particularly distressing thing
about Gabbi’s story is that she appears to have followed all the rules about
how to react if your child is being bullied — alerting the school, and offering
love and reassurance to her daughter. Yet she is still living every mother’s nightmare.
The photographs she pulls from her bag today are striking in their sunniness.
Izzy was beautiful. Gabbi says their life — ‘until all this started’ — was,
too. Gabbi always knew she was going to
be a single mum. Her relationship with Izzy’s father, Eugene Conway, ended
before Izzy was born, which led to a particularly intense mother-daughter bond.
‘I loved being a mum,’ she says,
managing a smile. ‘It wasn’t easy, bringing her up on my own, but Izzy was the
loveliest child: clever, thoughtful, kind. Yes, when she hit her teens she
could be moody and we had our moments, but overall she was a
joy: bright, opinionated, fun. ‘She wanted to be a journalist. She was very articulate. If
she was here today, she’d do a much better job of this than me.’ Izzy was always aware of her father’s existence, and ‘knew
she could meet him when she was ready’. She did, in fact, meet him not long
before she died, although her mother insists this did not cause her to become
depressed.
‘If
anything, I was more fazed than she was. She was curious about him, and took it
in her stride,’ she says. ‘They met once, then would talk on the phone. I don’t
know how much of a relationship there was going to be there, but she was open
to the idea of it, I think. There was no hint of upset about it.’ Although Izzy was born in the UK, she and Gabbi moved to
Australia in 2003 and Izzy grew up in Darwin. She thrived at school and was a
popular pupil. ‘Academic strength is seen as a good thing by other pupils
there,’ Gabbi says, pointedly.
Two
years ago, they moved back to the UK to be closer to family and settled in
Brixham. Izzy was excited about the move, and at first loved her new school.
Yet the bullying started very soon, first over her accent, then her
‘swottiness’. Gabbi says: ‘She was called Australian Freak, then Boffin — which
wasn’t a compliment. The other kids would take the mickey out of her because
she said she liked astronomy. They’d laugh at how she talked to the teachers —
politely.’
Izzy 'adored' many of her teachers
but they failed to tackle the bullies
Did
Izzy want to be popular? ‘Terribly. She did everything to try to fit in. She
used to wear a skirt that was just above the knee but they called her frumpy
and frigid, so she begged me to buy her shorter ones.’ Gabbi was appalled when some of the
unpleasantness developed a sexual edge. In the playground one day, she says,
Izzy was approached by an older boy who told her, “I have a 12 inch c*** and
I’m going to put it in you.” ‘I
complained to the school about it, twice. I was told the boy had been dealt
with, but it was shocking — to me and to Izzy. She was quite upset.’ Because she was having such a hard
time settling into her new school, Gabbi agreed that when Izzy turned 13 last
year she could get a Facebook account. This opened a whole new can of worms.
‘The bullying just started there, too. “Friends” from school would message her,
saying the same sort of things. It was general name- calling — “you are ugly;
you are a slut” sort of thing. ‘And boys she was starting to get interested in
would ask her to post naked pictures. There is a game called “body part for
body part”. The first time it happened, six months before she died, Izzy came
to me, really upset by it because she
had thought this boy was genuinely interested in her.’
When Izzy asked to join a website
called Ask.fm, a Latvian-run site on which users can post anonymous questions,
“because everyone at school was on it”, things got even more worrying. The
website, which has around 70 million users, was implicated in the
suicides of bullied 15-year-old Joshua Unsworth and 14-year-old Hannah Smith
earlier this year.
‘It is an appalling site because it
is completely anonymous. We suspect that some of the vitriol she got on there
was from people from school because the language was so similar, but we have no
way of knowing for sure,’ Gabbi says. ‘Izzy showed me how it worked, and I was
horrified. Once she was asked, “Do you shave your c***?” then, “What kind
of panties are you wearing?” I told her she had to shut down her account
immediately.’ While Izzy could leave Ask.fm, she could not shut down her
contact with the bullies at school.
In June of this year, a trip to a
local music festival — one Izzy had hoped would convince the other girls that
she was as cool as them — ended in tears. ‘They told her to go home, she wasn’t welcome.
She came home and sobbed her heart out. Then she wrote that poem.’ On the day
she died, September 17, Izzy herself had a meeting with her headteacher — the one
who’d told her mother there was no ‘evidence’ of bullying.
The outcome? ‘They talked about how
she felt so isolated at breaktimes and lunchtimes and had nowhere to go to
escape the bullies. The head said she should go home and “brainstorm” some
ideas about running a lunchtime club for younger pupils.’ When Izzy came home that night she was
‘low’.‘She seemed tired and a bit cranky. We had words because I wanted to
watch The Great British Bake Off and she didn’t. But there was nothing to
suggest she was going to do what she did.
‘I remember she painted her nails —
she was so meticulous about how she looked — then went up to her room and did
her homework, had a shower, got her bag ready for school, laid out her uniform.
‘I popped in and we had another chat about how the bullying was getting on top
of her. It was nothing we hadn’t done 100 times before, and I’d always give her
the talk about how she was stronger than the bullies. ‘Then I went downstairs while she got ready
for bed. I had a cup of tea and a cigarette —
she hates me smoking so I did it outside. I was gone 15 minutes, tops. In that
15 minutes my life was destroyed.’
When she came back inside, Gabbi
went back upstairs to see if Izzy was getting into bed, but the bedroom door
did not swing back as usual. ‘Something was blocking it, and it was Izzy,’ she
says, and breaks down completely.
Her description of the hours that
followed is too awful to relate in detail, but she managed to get her
daughter’s body down and dial 999, then ran hysterically into the street.
Neighbours tried to revive Izzy while she ‘just took off’.
‘It’s all a blur. At one point I ran
into a car. A police officer had to restrain me. ‘I remember him saying, “I am
so sorry to have to do this” as he got me to the ground.’ But in all the horror, there were
moments of pure human compassion that have stayed in Gabbi’s memory. ‘I found out later that there was a policeman assigned to
the house. He could have stood guard at the front door, or outside Izzy’s
bedroom door. There was no requirement for him to be in the room.
‘But that man sat on the floor for
two-and-a-half hours holding my daughter’s hand, even though she was already
dead. I can never thank him enough for that, because it should have been me
there with her. I should have gone back.’
That officer was also at Izzy’s
memorial service. ‘He
told me he will never forget her,’ she says. ‘My job now is to make sure no one
else does, either.’ Gabbi
has made a formal complaint to the board of governors at Izzy’s school, and has
called for the Government to ban Ask.fm.
A spokesman for the Brixham College
Board of Governors said yesterday: ‘We are aware that a letter has been
received from Izzy’s mother. As this is currently a matter for the coroner, we
do not feel it appropriate to make any comment at this time.’ But what Gabbi really hopes, though,
is that young people like Izzy — and the teenagers who bullied her — will read
her story, and ‘think for a minute’. She
tells me she has supported the setting up of a Facebook memorial group in
Izzy’s name and intends to lobby for greater action to be taken against
bullies, and for more support in schools for those targeted.
‘My daughter isn’t the first
teenager to kill herself because of bullies, but I would like her to be the last,’
she says. ‘She
would have been the first person to speak out about injustice. She was a member
of Amnesty. She wanted to change the world. Maybe she still can.’