I fear older celebrity mums give women like me false hope

Constantly pestered for nude pictures. Secretly filmed having sex. And forced into explicit acts before their first kiss. In the week women united against sexual violence, schoolgirls bravely describe . . .

On a summer’s day two years ago, my 14-year-old daughter Clio returned from a walk in our local park in tears. she had met up with a boy the same age as her, whom she’d been facetiming after they’d met at a mutual friend’s birthday party a few months before.

they got on well. But when, after an hour of chatting, the boy suggested they find a quiet spot to sit down, it became clear he felt the preliminary introductions had gone on long enough.

when Clio had to repeatedly say she did not want certain parts of her body to be touched intimately, she remembers noticing how the face of this boy, previously so sweet and well-mannered, changed. ‘It was like he stopped seeing me as a person, but saw me as a thing,’ she told me. ‘when I kept saying no, he got angry. after ten minutes, I got up and left and he called me a b **** . I never heard from him again, except for two messages, which were links to porn videos, so I blocked him.’

when I tell this story, I am not betraying a confidence. I tell it because Clio, now 16, wants it to be told.

she is one of a growing number of young girls already exhausted by and angry about the stream of sexual coercion from boys their own age. where once we might have expected only adult women to have to deal with such harassment, our daughters now find them

selves confronting an aggressive sexual culture when they are barely out of primary school. gone are the days when young people’s sexuality could develop at a natural pace. Now they are fast-tracked through this phase by pornography. It means that even if, like Clio, they don’t view it themselves, it has radicalised the way boys behave towards them.

look no further than the new online platform Everyone’s Invited. like Clio, more than 4,700 young people have uploaded their experiences anonymously to the website and social media campaign. some are as young as 11.

the experiences, mainly from girls, range from being drugged and assaulted at parties to being pressured to send nude pictures to older boys.

It was set up last June by soma sara, 22, a former pupil of £40,350-a-year Wycombe Abbey in Buckinghamshire.

she says: ‘In the holidays I grew up in london social circles and sex was a palpable presence throughout my teens. Disgusting behaviour was trivialised. It could be sexual coercion, rape, catcalling, sexual bullying. sexual abuse didn’t just exist. It thrived.’

As some stories are from pupils from some of the uK’s best-known private schools, it is clear that privilege offers no protection. schools mentioned include Eton, st Paul’s in Barnes, south-West london, and latymer upper in hammersmith, West london, which is taking the allegations about male pupils so seriously it has reported them to police.

In a statement, latymer said: ‘the welfare of our students and alumni is of the utmost importance to us and we take any report or allegation made by a member of our community extremely seriously. sexual harassment and abuse have no place at latymer or in the wider world.

‘such behaviours are completely incompatible with latymer’s values and contrary to our ethos of respect for others.’

last week, st Paul’s school condemned the actions described and said it had also reported Everyone’s Invited’s allegations to its local council’s safeguarding team. Eton said it took any claims ‘extremely seriously’, would investigate thoroughly and take appropriate disciplinary action.

As a mother who lives in an area of london popular for its range of impressive independent schools, it seems to me the problem may even be worse in the private sector.

one relative’s daughter begged her parents to let her leave the mixed sixth form of her £39,000-a-year boarding school. she said teachers refused to take her allegations of rape by a boy with a reputation for sexually assaulting drunk girls seriously because an expulsion might attract media attention and would tarnish the school’s reputation. While she left the school, rather than face her assailant every day, he was made a prefect.

But wherever the incidents mentioned on Everyone’s Invited have taken place, every single story feels like a punch to the gut, especially after the murder of sarah Everard as she walked home earlier this month. taken together, the campaign tells the story of a generation of young women no longer respected by the young men they have grown up with.

No matter what the incident, the common thread that runs through them is the sense of shame and powerlessness that lingers long after the parties and hook-ups have ended.

so what has changed? When I was my daughters’ age, yes there were times when I was catcalled and flashed by older men. A couple of times when I was at Durham university, I felt pressured to do things that I wish, in retrospect, I had said no to. But this generation of girls are growing up with a generation of boys whose healthy natural curiosity about sex has been turbo-charged by pornography. It means that girls rarely feel completely safe.

of course, girls see porn too. But it is precisely this insecurity at a vulnerable time of their lives that means they are groomed to go along with the sex acts shown — and which means they feel less able to stand up to the humiliating sexual expectations some boys impose on them. Wall-to-wall images of female submission encourage boys and girls to believe that it’s not unusual for a girl to give oral sex before she’s even had her first kiss.

this week I almost wept with frustration when my older daughter, lily, 19, showed me a blog by a group of girls at another household-name public school that had been attended by some of her friends. It read more like a collection of crime scenes than school memories. girls being taken advantage of while drunk, being groped at parties, discovering that their sexual encounters had been filmed without their knowledge and distributed. one girl told how boys at the school made a ‘tier list’ of girls ranked in order of looks, using a marking system to rate their body parts, like cuts of meat.

We don’t talk to our daughters about sex and relationships soon enough. And, crucially, we say even less to our sons. yet at the same time, our children are growing up with a limitless supply of the most violent, misogynistic porn ever created. No wonder our young people are failing when it comes to healthy sexual relationships.

so where do we go from here? yes, relationship education has to be better, given sooner and taught by dedicated experts, not embarrassed members of staff with a bit of free time.

We have to keep telling girls — and boys when it happens to them too — that they are entitled to shout out if they are sexually abused, and that they must also speak up when they see sexual bullying and assault happening to others.

Instead of cramming them for exams that we believe will decide their life chances, we would be better off putting one simple life lesson on the curriculum. And that is, whatever messages porn may scream at our sons, every single one of our daughters has the right to be treated with dignity, not as an object on which to try out what they have seen on screen.

‘Porn has radicalised the way that boys behave