Our and many others experience is that this fear is never realised if the facilitator has recruited the right people and asked the key questions from the heart - i.e. as if they mattered. Sometimes the whole class session will be used by individual pupils as an opportunity to express their anger and frustration with the focus child. As long as the facilitator provides a boundary for these strong feelings and does not allow the session to become solely about complaining, then it is helpful for this to happen- the message is that this is real and people are being listened to. With these feelings off their chests, the class is more likely to be able to move on and look at ways forward to help the focus child. Groups always have suggestions when asked this and they are usually the right ones.
Friends are people who care enough to notice and tell the truth.
We like to put the answering of this question back to the person who asked it. Often hard questions like this are easier to think about and imagine solutions to if you personalise them. Put in a personal way it is easier to think what you might do and therefore to have ideas for what could be done for the focus child. Another approach to answering this question is to remember that the person who smells bad may be aware of this but does not have a means of asking for help to overcome the problem. A circle of friends provides a context in which help can be sought.