A few months back I got transferred to another department because they needed an extra hand. The majority of that time it was just myself (I’m a female) and two guys (one of them is related to the manager) From what I can remember they often make jokes, gossiped a lot and spoke about others in not a nice way and as much as I tried avoiding it, I couldn’t. I somehow ended up joining a WhatsApp group with them and a few others because I thought it was a work related group, it turned out to be a group solely based on making fun of one particular individual (that individual was also in the group.) I ended up leaving because I felt uncomfortable and was the only female. A month or so later I ended up finding myself back in that group alongside another female. I never made any comments or participated.
It got to a point to where I felt myself behaving like them (not being horrible towards others) but I felt like I was becoming toxic. It was all day, everyday and it was constant to a point it ended up affecting me badly. I felt like because I was a female and I’m quite small/petite and vulnerable, they targeted me.
There was an incident a couple of weeks back where one of them thought it would be funny to throw an empty cardboard box at my head and then afterwards proceed to pick me up.
Last week I had had enough and decided to tell my manager about the environment I was working in and how I didn’t feel comfortable.