I'm 28 now, so the bottles being thrown at me thing happened when I was a teenager. I lived in a very rough area at the time, a small town where a lot of young people liked to cause trouble. If you didn't fit in any way you were seen as an outcast. Also, sometimes there doesn't have to be a reason, some people will just outright not like you. You can be in the wrong place at the wrong time, many different reasons, etc. Maybe I should of called the police but I wanted to get out of there and home as soon as possible. Another factor is that I was a female on my own and there were several of them. I can hold my own at times but in that situation it's better to walk away I think.
On another note I remember reading about the Sophie Lancaster incident that happened here in 2007.