I was not the typical victim of a bully, being kinda hyper and happy and sociable, but in 2nd grade, I ended up standing up for the kid who was getting bullied, but I did it in a way that didn't work, at all. I said it wasn't nice to be mean to her. Well... after that, I became their new victim, and the kid I defended found a little side group of kids who weren't popular, but weren't outcasts. But no one would associate with the kid who was being bullied, of fear of the same thing happening. So, for that entire year, not one kid in the grade would say anything nice to me at school. Away from school, most of them would be okay, but they ignored me in school, and the bullies taunted. What really made it bad though, was that the teachers completely ignored it. Eventually, my mom told the teacher to do something. The moron suggested that it was my fault, and that I see a psychiatrist, and they had little things once a week, once for the bullied to talk about their feelings, the other for the bullies. Apparently they didn't want to hurt the bullies feelings. Bah. So they did nothing to help at all, rather, they made it worse.
So, my mom decided that she would send me to a different school. The teacher at the school I was going to at the time said that it was a bad idea, that I needed to learn how to socialize. Mom, seeing how miserable I was, decided to send me to a different school, and if that didn't work, then do something else. I did manage to convince her eventually that I didn't want to go to the psychiatrist, cause it was boring.
Anyway, the teachers at the new school (which is, amusingly, full of the ultra-wealthy) didn't tolerate the same junk. In their opinion, if a kid was bullying another, they were being a brat and ought to be punished. So, they lost recess and such if they were being obnoxious, and their parents actually yelled at them if they found they were bullies, unlike the ones at the other school, who insisted that their angels would never do such a thing. I did have a lot of self-confidence issues through middle school though, as a result, and I didn't make friends easily.
I did learn how to deal with bullies though. No one at my current school has tried to bully me, but some have attempted to be nasty to my friend. She never reacted, but it pissed me off. I recall saying something to a nasty little bully, when she commented on the ugliness of my friend's pants, about how if she had enough time to analyze my friend's pants that she had way too much time on her hands, and that she ought to get a few friends, and a life. It did work.
Essentially, in my experience, one needs to be clever in responding to bullies. Saying something about how it's not nice will make it worse, but making the bully feel dumb usually deters them. But it only needs to be said when they cause trouble, not any more than that. Most little girls get teased about how they look or what they wear, so it's very easy to tell them that one is flattered that the bully is so drawn to them that they must stare. It's quite funny really ^.^ A smart bully can respond well enough to it, but their crowd usually laughs at the comment. And the approval of the crowd makes one a bad target. Being aggressively polite also works.