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I started high school last year with some friends I’ve known for a long time. One of those friends has started to act toxically with other people.

I have been distancing myself from her for a while, but nothing seems to work. She is really sensitive and has a history of dishonesty, which makes confronting her about my feelings incredibly difficult. She talks badly about many people, but pretends to them that they are the problem.

I have already talked to teachers about this, but they take her side, and I always get in trouble. I don’t know how to bring this up or get her to understand I don’t want to be her friend any more. What should I do?

Starting high school is a big step and there’s lots of change, and whenever there’s change in a group there’s a jostling for position and a lot of insecurities come out. It’s also a big step because you go from being the oldest students in school to the youngest, and are exposed to far more adult behaviours. I wonder what’s going on with your friend, but it’s important to remember you are absolutely not responsible for her behaviour. So while it’s really good to think compassionately about what’s happening to others, ultimately they own their behaviour and you own yours. It’s never too early to learn this.

I went to Alison Roy, who is a child and adolescent psychotherapist. She said the fact you had noticed something had changed for your friend, while “also being aware that your feelings showed real maturity”.

It’s frustrating that the teachers don’t seem to hear what you say, but teachers, while doing a great job, aren’t always the best people to help you deal with the psychology of friendships. Also, as Roy pointed out, “teachers don’t always have the time or bandwidth for friendship dynamics and would expect you to try to resolve things independently”. It can be very different from how things are managed in primary school.

Roy also explained that when people (young or old) feel insecure “they can start to behave differently. There may well be something else going on for your friend that you won’t know about, and they might not want to tell you. You could ask a few gentle questions, although it isn’t your responsibility to fix things. What you do have control over is how you deal with your own feelings and concerns; and sometimes when people change and we find we have less in common with them, it’s an opportunity to try out new friendships and move outside our comfort zones a bit.”

The defensiveness and dishonesty your friend displays could be due to shame, and the reasons people can be like that are complex. But again, that’s not for you to fix.

Learning to put in boundaries, but also thinking about what might be going on for others (with the caveats we’ve mentioned), are really important life skills. So is being able to communicate with people you used to get on with but now find challenging. Most friendships will rupture at some point, the real skill is in the repair. Lots of adults struggle with this.

You say you don’t want to be her friend any more, but you are also asking for help. Sometimes the simplest solution is right there, but we don’t take it. Here, that would be asking your friend, in a quiet moment, something like: “I don’t feel we get on as well as we did. I wonder how it feels for you?” And taking it from there. You can’t do all the work for her, but this would be an incredibly mature thing to do. I always think face to face is best, because you can get a “360” view on that person – ie, not just what they say on text, but what clues are in their body language.

Unfortunately, you can’t make your friend understand – that’s her job. But you can start the conversation, and in so doing you will be making an important first step in communication. And perhaps, even if you don’t sort this out, you will gather some important information that helps you move on. Keep me posted!

Every week, Annalisa Barbieri addresses a personal problem sent in by a reader. If you would like advice from Annalisa, please send your problem to ask.annalisa@theguardian.com. Annalisa regrets she cannot enter into personal correspondence. Submissions are subject to our terms and conditions. The latest series of Annalisa’s podcast is available here.

On 7 July 2005, I was a bright-eyed 24-year-old working for the Association of University Teachers, based just off Tavistock Square in central London. I spent my days working on equal pay campaigns for the higher education trade union and my weekends dancing with friends at drum’n’bass clubs. That morning, I caught the bus to work earlier than usual, getting off opposite the location where, one hour later, Leeds-born Hasib Hussain detonated a bomb that killed 13 people.

By the time we heard the explosion, tension had already gripped our offices. Three bombs had exploded on the London transport network, including one between King’s Cross and Russell Square station, which was minutes from where we were. The office was quiet, with fewer than half our colleagues present and, with mobile networks down, it took hours to learn who was safe. We were held in our building all day by the police, anxiously following news reports and trying to get hold of loved ones. The atmosphere was tense as we waited, not knowing what would happen next. Around 6pm, we were finally let out and, with public transport suspended, I joined thousands of others walking home. There was a surreal and quiet calm as we crossed Waterloo Bridge, with no cars or buses, just thousands of people, hushed and altered, trying to process what had happened.

Like all Londoners, I was shocked by the attacks. But as a British Muslim, I felt equally worried about the potential rise in Islamophobia. We were living through the “war on terror” – a global campaign after 9/11 that led to the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, the establishment of Guantánamo Bay detention camp and the introduction of sweeping anti-terror legislation in the UK, with suspects allowed to be detained without charge and evidence obtained through torture admissible in courts. Everything had changed for Muslim communities – the suspicion, the inflammatory rhetoric, the racist attacks. I was nervous about what could happen now.

I was living in south London, not far from where, just two weeks later, another attack would be attempted, though fortunately that time the devices didn’t work. A hunt began to find the bombers, and the next morning, on 22 July, reports came in that police had shot a man at Stockwell station. I watched Metropolitan police commissioner Sir Ian Blair say that the shooting was linked to the counter-terrorism operation and that “the man had been challenged, and refused to obey officers”. The following day, it was revealed that the person killed was an innocent 27-year-old Brazilian electrician on his way to work. His name was Jean Charles de Menezes.

My immediate reaction was sadness at the loss of innocent life, followed closely suspicion about the circumstances. If you’re a person of colour living in the UK, you learn to be sceptical of police briefings, and it was worrying to think we now had a de facto shoot-to-kill policy. As Muslims, it felt as if we faced a double threat – from terrorists who could attack any of us, and from the police who targeted us indiscriminately. Later, officers’ notes would reveal Jean was identified as being the possible terrorist because of his “Mongolian eyes”.

Two days after the shooting, I attended a vigil in Stockwell to pay tribute to Jean with some friends. I pulled out my tobacco to roll a cigarette and turned to the man smoking next to me, to ask for a light. As he gave me one, I made an innocuous comment, “What a tragedy, eh?” He turned to me, eyes welling, and said, “Yes, he was my best friend.”

He introduced himself as Fausto, a softly spoken Brazilian, in a deep state of shock. After offering my condolences, my campaigner’s instinct kicked in. How were the family? Did they have legal representation? I knew in these cases legal support was critical and passed on my number in case the family needed help.

Later that day, I got a call from an unrecognised number. A man with a Brazilian accent introduced himself as Alex Pereira, cousin of Jean Charles de Menezes. “I don’t know who you are,” he said briskly, “but I was told you could get us a lawyer,” before launching into a tirade claiming that the police had taken the Menezes family to a hotel in Kingston upon Thames, cut the phone lines in their room and left them isolated. He was calling from a payphone.

I immediately contacted my friend Asad Rehman, a big-hearted northerner and long-time civil rights organiser, who chaired the Newham Monitoring Project (NMP), a grassroots anti-racism group that worked on cases of police misconduct. Asad is a force of nature, the kind of person you want in a crisis, deeply compassionate, with political fierceness. He had spent many years supporting families in high-profile cases of police violence and, without hesitation, got in touch with Gareth Peirce, the renowned human rights solicitor. Peirce had made her name in the 1980s representing Irish victims of miscarriages of justice, such as the Guildford Four and Birmingham Six. More recently she had been challenging the British government’s anti-terror laws. The lawyers would be on their way, Asad told me. I should go to Kingston and wait with the family.

I jumped in a cab, unsure exactly what my role would be. But when I arrived, I realised it was simply to care. So I sat in the hotel lobby with four young cousins of Jean’s, Alex and Alessandro Pereira, Patricia da Silva Armani and Vivian Figuirdo, listening to their grief and fury in a mix of English and Brazilian Portuguese. Gareth Peirce arrived shortly after, along with Asad and Marcia Willis Stewart, a solicitor from the Birnberg Peirce team. Peirce walked over to the family and introduced herself, “Hello, my name is Gareth. I’m a lawyer. Would you like to talk?”

The family were adamant that Jean was entirely innocent, that he hadn’t been wearing a bulky jacket or carrying a rucksack, as the media were reporting, and wouldn’t have run from the police. They instructed Gareth to represent them. I thought I’d done my good deed for the day, but as we walked out of the hotel, Marcia asked if I could accompany the family to the coroner’s court the next morning. Instinctively, I said yes. And so began my unexpected journey into one of the most prominent police killings in British history.

The next morning, I went with Alex and family friend Erionaldo to Southwark coroner’s court and then on to the Brazilian embassy, where we met with Brazilian officials, with police family liaison officers nearby. The family were encouraged not to have an independent autopsy – usually a crucial part of investigations after contentious deaths – and to accept the police’s apology and move on, so Jean’s body could be repatriated for the funeral in Brazil. When I piped up from the back and suggested that maybe this was a decision for their solicitor, embassy staff asked the family who I was and why I was there. Patricia responded, “I don’t know who these people are, but they’re the only ones helping us.” Our relationship began properly after that.

While I was with the family, Asad activated his network at NMP, a group experienced in these kinds of cases. I updated friends with whom I’d attended the vigil, and we held our first campaign meeting at the Birnberg Peirce office. Asad, always gentle but clear, told the family, “You’re not the first people to lose a loved one at the hands of the police. And, sadly, you won’t be the last. But if you want, we can help you run a campaign to try to get the truth and justice you deserve. It will take many years and we can’t guarantee what will happen … but we can be here for you.” The family were in.

By the end of that night, we had a campaign name – Justice4Jean – and a set of objectives. We agreed to build a website, print witness call-out leaflets, hold a press conference so the family could speak to the media and organise a memorial service at Westminster Cathedral to coincide with Jean’s funeral in Brazil in five days’ time. We were nothing if not ambitious.

The family went home to rest and we piled into a pub: I realised I’d barely eaten all day and inhaled a bag of cheese and onion crisps in silent exhaustion. I turned to Asad, dazed by all that had happened in only 24 hours. “I don’t know … I’ve not done this before,” I said, aware that we were embarking on something significant. He patted my back and grinned. “Well, you have now, love,” he said in his broad Lancashire accent. And I guess that was that.

Though I didn’t know it at the time, I was stepping into a story that would define the next decade of my life – one that would take me from evening classes learning Portuguese to Gonzaga, the town in rural Brazil where Jean grew up, and eventually to a job at the charity Inquest, supporting families bereaved by deaths in custody. The campaign was overwhelming, filling evenings and weekends, taking every ounce of energy I had. But I wasn’t alone. There were Estelle and Zareena, tirelessly managing logistics and liaising with the legal team; Mike and Alistair, handling press, building the website and fielding calls from unexpected supporters (Axl Rose’s manager once rang to say the Guns N’ Roses frontman was keen to support the family); Kevin and Cilius, who shared insights from other police justice campaigns; and Caoimhe and Priya, who offered emotional care. Asad and I shared the work of coordinating political and media strategy. We were ordinary people improvising through extraordinary circumstances. No formal roles, no funding, just doing what needed to be done.

From the outset, the family insisted that the police were lying to deflect from their mistakes. All they wanted was for someone to be held responsible, for police officers not to be above the law. Damaging stories began to surface: that Jean had overstayed his visa and fled in fear; that cocaine was in his system, explaining his supposed agitation. There was even an allegation of rape, though records later showed he was out of the country at the time of the alleged incident. Each claim served the same purpose: to discredit him. We kept asking the press: who is feeding you these stories, and why? NMP and Inquest were all too aware that often, after a death at the hands of the police, officers conferred on their notes, presented a version of events that absolved them of wrongdoing and tried to smear the victim’s character.

There were also procedural challenges. Ian Blair tried to block the Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) from starting its investigation until seven days after the event – a vital time when evidence could have been removed or tampered with. None of the CCTV cameras were said to be working on the Stockwell tube platform that day, adding to the family’s suspicion that the police had something to hide.

This feeling persisted until Lana Vandenberghe, a whistleblower inside the IPCC, leaked evidence from its investigations. The videos and images taken by police officers and the IPCC confirmed the family’s account: Jean had entered Stockwell station calmly, picking up a newspaper and using his card at the ticket barrier. The next images were from inside the tube carriage, his body face down, soaked in blood. A media storm blew up. Were the police lying? What did the Met commissioner know and when? And, again, why had Jean been killed?

Around that time, press attacks turned on us. The Telegraph ran a photo of Asad and me with the headline “Marxists have hijacked family’s quest for justice”. Howard Jacobson, writing in the Independent, described those of us supporting the family as “ghouls … feeding on de Menezes’ body” and “dining out on the family’s grief”. It was deeply insulting to the family to accuse them of being manipulated, stripping them of their agency, intelligence and right to fight for answers. As Jean’s brother Giovanni said that summer, “We may be poor, but we’re not stupid.”

Over the course of the campaign, we supported the family in every way we could: attending legal meetings, running fundraisers and trying to keep the story alive. When the president of Brazil, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, visited the UK for trade talks, Asad took the family to Heathrow at the moment his plane was landing and announced to the press assembled there that the family had come to meet Lula and ask for his help in their campaign for justice. Once there, the president couldn’t ignore them, and he met the family privately at the end of his trip.

I found my passion doing media work; writing briefings and press releases, and liaising with journalists. Increasingly, I also spent time navigating interactions with strangers who would turn up very enthusiastic about the case, wanting to get involved. Some in the campaign chastised me for being controlling, but I felt the stakes were too high and wanted to keep the core team small, confined to just the people I knew and trusted. Years later, my instincts were proved right. During the Spycops scandal, we learned that undercover officers had reported on our activities (including covertly attending our campaign launch meeting). The Menezes family are now participants in the Undercover Policing Inquiry.

After two damning IPCC reports and the Crown Prosecution Service’s refusal to charge any officers, our focus turned to the inquest – a chance for a jury to determine whether Jean had been killed unlawfully. The family was represented by a team led by the formidable Mike Mansfield QC, and each day we sat in the courtroom with the family and Harriet Wistrich, their lead solicitor, who had worked tirelessly to prepare the case. We heard independent witnesses describe what they had seen at Stockwell station, and listened to police give conflicting accounts. Officers claimed they had shouted warnings; other witnesses said they had heard none. Officers said Jean advanced towards them; other witnesses said he did not. We heard that the surveillance officer assigned to identify the suspect they were looking for, Hussain Osman, missed Jean walking out of the block of flats he lived in – to which Osman had been linked – because he was taking a piss. That they were given a poor-quality image of the suspect. The catalogue of errors was staggering.

As the inquest drew to a close, the coroner made an unexpected decision. With the jury out of the room, he issued a gagging order to the media before announcing he had decided that “unlawful killing” would not be an option for the jury; they could only return “lawful killing” or an “open verdict”. My mouth dropped open.

The family launched a judicial review immediately, furious at what we saw as an attempt to block accountability. After years of pain, lies and investigations, it felt as if the state was intervening to protect itself, just at the very moment we might win. When our judicial review failed, I felt heartbroken for the family. They had given so much and faced obstruction at every turn.

We sat in a cafe close to the Royal Courts of Justice, pondering our next steps. After much discussion, we decided to hold a protest inside the courtroom in a last-minute appeal to the jury. But somehow word got out. When we arrived at court the next day, we were told the public and press were barred from the courtroom and security guards came to forcibly remove us as a journalist shouted, “This is not a fascist state!” After a 90-minute standoff, the coroner relented. The press and family could stay, but the rest of us had to leave.

We gathered in the lawyers’ room. The Menezes family were calm and determined to go ahead with the protest. They were recent migrants to the UK, from a poor, rural part of central Brazil, working in casual jobs as cleaners and couriers. The British courts had been daunting even for us, let alone for them, but now they were going to face this one alone.

Marcia pulled us all into a circle and told the family, “We’re all going to leave now, because the most important thing is for this process to continue. But when you do this, I want you to know that we’re in front of you, behind you, to your left, to your right. And when you stand up in that court, I want you to think about Jean, why his life mattered and why we’re all here.” We stood together weeping and holding hands.

As the family went into court, I waited anxiously outside, straining to hear muffled voices. Suddenly the doors opened and they walked out, heads higher than I had ever seen them, with court officials looking flabbergasted behind them. At the moment the coroner announced to the jury he would not allow “unlawful killing”, the family rose up, removed their jumpers and revealed their T-shirts, which said “Unlawful Killing. Your Legal Right to Decide”. In silence, they walked over to the jury, stood before them for 30 seconds, then walked out. We met them with cheers and elated high-fives. They were transformed, beaming and radiant in their power. The state threw everything it could to destroy them – but it couldn’t take away their dignity.

In the end, the jury returned an open verdict, but on every important point asked by the coroner, they believed independent witnesses over the police. They were asked if they believed officers shouted the words “armed police” before firing? They replied no. Did Jean move towards officers in the carriage, as the police claimed? No. Did his behaviour increase the suspicions of officers? No. I have no doubt that, had they been given the choice, they would have returned an unlawful killing verdict. No police officers were ever held accountable for the killing.

Twenty years on, I speak to the Menezes family often, though it’s often about our children these days – growing up in a world we’re still trying to change. In a few weeks, we’ll gather again outside Stockwell station to mark the anniversary of Jean’s death, the questions we asked back then echoing today: who gets protected, who gets punished and who is believed?

Over the years, a number of documentaries and dramas have been made about the case, many of them compelling, but most telling the story from the police perspective. This has always felt wrong to me. The best stories aren’t told from the corridors of power, but by the people who lived and breathed the injustice.

On the 20th anniversary of the shooting, on 22 July, we’ll lay flowers, offer prayers and light candles, and I’ll think of Jean, a man I never met, and all that he lost. But I’ll also think of the ripples of resistance that followed his death, the pain that gave way to purpose, and the strangers who became friends. In a world filled with turmoil, it can often feel hard to know how to make a difference. But the Menezes campaign reminds me that sometimes, simply showing up and standing beside someone in grief – when the world turns away – is its own kind of justice.