Today so many children are free only on paper, or on Snapchat. No one taught them to be kind to the boy who has acne, no one communicated that aesthetics is for the unfortunate who refuse to see the different shades of a rainbow. As a society we haven’t walked the middle-ground, and now many of our children don’t know what is ‘normal’. Two, and more crucially, along with drugs and sexual bullying, body shaming too has crossed a line, crushing fledgling souls and their self-esteem. For one, it was never this rampant and vicious. Shaming as a form of insult and humiliation has done many calendar repeats, but there is something different in the air. But little by little, she has started smiling again. Although she is back in school, she continues to be in therapy and on medication. By the time Tara was rushed to hospital, she had lost 13kg in five months.Ī year after the ordeal, Tara’s mother still finds it hard to move on. In severe depression, the teenager stopped eating completely and finally collapsed.

Tara became a recluse, but even in her solitude the demons were chasing her she started having frequent nightmares of schoolgirls beating her up.

Her smile was gone and she would cry for no apparent reason. The trigger for Tara was a school camp where she was bullied and body-shamed endlessly. Barely a teen yet in the makebelieve world of adult games, Tara was completely out of her depth and it didn’t take long for her to be convinced that she was indeed plump and that was the reason no boy was interested in her.

Tara could have perhaps handled their constant comments were it not for the fact that girls around her were going out on dates, but no boy had asked her out yet. But jealous seniors in the squad picked on her due to her weight. At thirteen, Tara had been successful at academics and also played for her school’s football team.

Nazia karamatullah death