Where is sorry in all of this?

There’s something a bit terrifying about teenage girls; hormone-crazed, hairflicking know-alls who seem to be inches taller than I ever was, and larger than life. They are so loud. They yell and do those highpitched, excited squeals that demand boys look at them, because boys are the entire centre of their universe. And they take up twice as much room as other people because they jiggle and sprawl and whack each other playfully, and actually don’t see anyone over the age of 20.

I speak from experience about the boy bit. I found a letter from my father recently that reminded me of just how crazy I was, with a crush on half a dozen boys at a time. My father seemed baffled, at a loss for words at this monster he’d unleashed, and I feel embarrassed even now. I was that girl.

I, too, was loud and falsely confident. I used my face for experiments with makeup that were, in retrospect, hilarious. I was reading women’s magazines and believed a mask-like face was vital. For what I can’t say.

I was also terrified. At 13 I had a near-rape experience because my mind was blank on how to behave when I was alone with a boy. It was inevitable that something unpleasant would happen, and it did. And it still does, because mating rituals are cruel and knock kids around emotionally, even more so if you factor in the misnamed social media.

You can be a cool kid, and bluff your way through, or you’ll be afraid, and quiet. You may even retreat into religious fundamentalism like Shamima Begum, the English schoolgirl who ran away from home at 15 to be the bride of an Islamic State fighter, and who has turned up in a Syrian refugee camp.

The tell-tale words are hers, ‘‘I married my husband. I wouldn’t have found someone like him back in the UK.’’ That sounds like she wanted a boyfriend, and her Dutch convert husband with regular features was it.

She was once a schoolgirl. She should have been dealing with ordinary things like arguing with her parents, acne, having crushes on boys, wearing clothes she’d later laugh about, and overdue homework.

Instead she joined two other schoolgirl recruits, one of whom is dead, and entered what most people would call hell.

Shamima is 19. Over the past four years she has had two children die of what she vaguely calls sickness, and has just delivered a third child in a refugee camp. She has no idea, she says, where her husband has gone, but she was keen to return to a country where children are looked after, and don’t starve.

‘‘I feel a lot of people should have sympathy for me, for everything I’ve been through,’’ she tells us. ‘‘I didn’t know what I was getting into when I left.’’

But it’s not easy to sympathise. Her experience has been so extreme, and her accounts of what she experienced so cold-blooded, that her British citizenship was revoked on Wednesday.

She has the option of Bangladeshi citizenship because her parents came from there. My hunch is that’s a lot less appealing.

Feel sorry for her? Why?

There were human heads lying around. That didn’t bother her. She still refers to Islamic State as ‘‘we’’, and says she doesn’t regret joining IS because it made her ‘‘stronger, tougher’’. She says Manchester’s terrorist bombing two years ago in her home country was justified. She just doesn’t get it.

Hardly surprising, then, that her tone-deaf plea for home fell on deaf ears. It didn’t occur to her to state, unequivocally, that she was sorry.