This Mom Got Sick Of Mean Girls Bullying Her Daughter — What She Did About It Came With A Price

Joanne Higgs is a 33-year-old mom of three from Manchester, England, who says she got sick and tired of mean girls at school bullying her daughter. So she decided to do something about it. What she did nearly landed her in the slammer — but she narrowly avoided incarceration when a judge handed her a pair of 15-month suspended sentences and ordered her to pay £250 — about $375 — to each of the two teen girls she was convicted of assaulting.

Defending kids from bullies, it appears, often comes with a price, as the Inquisitr story at this link from last year tragically proves.

Joanne Higgs said that her 14-year-old daughter, Demi Knox — a student at Middleton Technology School — was the target of school bullies for at least two years leading up to the incident outside her home on April 1 last year.

But she says that after her daughter was tormented in a playground confrontation, the mom came home to find what she said was a gang of 15 rowdy and aggressive teen gathered outside her house, not only shouting threats, but openly pelting the home with eggs.

“I had tried to call the police to tell them about it. These kids were taunting me in the street, they were hanging round my house. There were shouting abuse at me and my daughter,” the single mom recounted. “I had tried to resolve it with the school and some of the parents after the fight but had no joy. I just wanted them to stop harassing my daughter. She’d already suffered enough.”

She said that her other two children were inside the house, screaming in panic, and the cops never showed up to break up the frightening gang.

According to prosecutors, what happened next was nothing but a brazen assault by adults on helpless teenage girls. But Higgs — who insists she acted alone even though prosecutors alleged that two unidentified men helped her in the attack — says she simply “snapped” and was only trying to defend her daughter.

She was accused of chasing down and tackling 13-year-old Lilly Hulse, then pushing and punching 15-year-old Dominique Nash — giving the teen girl a black eye — when Nash tried to help her friend.

In a video posted on the Manchester Evening News Facebook page — which can be viewed on this page, above — Higgs admitted that “what I did was wrong,” but defended her actions, saying, “any parent would understand who was in my position, and would probably do the same if they had to go through what I’ve been through.”

But Allison Crompton, head teacher at Middleton Technology School, called the actions taken by Joanne Higgs to defend her daughter, “appalling,” adding, “the school was dismayed and disgusted that our students were attacked in this way by an adult.”

Editor’s note: The Inquisitr’s management and editorial team would like to clarify that Dominique Nash was not reported to have engaged in any bullying. Her name has been mentioned solely in the context of having been assaulted by Joanne Higgs when trying to intervene on behalf of Lilly Hulse; it should not be inferred that she was a part of the group of bullying teens. We apologize for the lack of specificity in the original report and hope this note of clarification serves to inform any readers who may have mistakenly drawn such a conclusion.

[Image: YouTube Screen Grab]