When we broke up he put naked images of me online... the comments were vile
SHOCKING TALES TO SHAME US ALL
HERE, six teens reveal their own harrowing stories of abuse.
BOYS FILM GIRLS HAVING SEX
Georgina, 17, says:
Right now, i just don’t want to be around boys. it doesn’t matter where they are from or how educated or smart they are, rape culture is like a virus in schools — and none of them believe that what they are doing is wrong.
For teenage boys at my school, it is a ‘flex’ — a way to get their friends’ respect — to have abused, harassed or even been violent towards a girl sexually.
Boys don’t believe their bad behaviour is sexual abuse, even if they say they do understand why it’s wrong.
i have been sent ‘d*** pics’ via text and Snapchat. that’s just normal now and boys don’t care when you ask them not to. they move on to another girl. talking to them is useless.
there is a teenage boy we all know who films himself having sex with girlfriends without telling them. he has done it with several girls and doesn’t stop, even though he has been asked by the girls not to do it. if a girl complains too much, he just dumps her and moves on to the next one.
he says he doesn’t see what he’s doing as sexual assault, even though it is wrong. We have to criminalise all this behaviour.
EX’S REVENGE PORN MADE MY LIFE HELL
Abi, 15, says:
My FiRSt boyfriend was someone i had known since we went to nursery school together. he went to a weekly boarding school and when we were 13 we used to hang out together at weekends.
he started messaging me every evening on Snapchat and asked me to send pictures of myself. Reluctantly i sent him a pic of my boobs. he kept pressuring me for more photos, so i sent pictures of me naked below the waist.
he started asking me about oral sex and one weekend he asked me to have sex with him. i didn’t really want to but he kept saying he knew what he was doing as he’d had sex with lots of girls.
We were only 14 but i thought it was normal if he was already doing it, so i let him. After that, lots of boys contacted me on social media and even came to the house to try to get me to go out with them. My mum gave me advice on how to break up with him.
But the weekend we split up, he put the pictures on social media and identified me. it was horrible. there were so many vile comments. My mum called him to tell him to take the pictures down. She then called the boy’s parents and contacted the headmaster at the school. We agreed not to go to the police if the parents and school dealt with it.
IT’S NORMAL FOR THEM TO GROPE US
Annabel, 16, says: it’S just normal among people my age. Boys talk about porn all the time in front of us. it makes me really uncomfortable but i feel like i have to act like it’s fine with me or they will roll their eyes and call me a feminist — which they consider an insult.
For a long time some boys i know called me Miss Banana and i had no idea why — until one of them told me it was a porn star they thought i looked like. it made me feel objectified but you just learn to laugh it off.
it’s normal for some of them to grab our bums and boobs but that’s considered a joke. girls are pressured into sending nude photos to boys. girls my age feel like they have to do it or the boy will stop liking them.
Some of the boys share the photos around. they talk about girls like they’re a prize to be won, to be boasted about to their friends. i try to challenge them but every time i bring it up they shoot me down by saying, ‘it’s only a joke, shut up!’
At my friend’s school, there is a remote corridor that none of the girls will go down on their own because boys will shove their hands up their skirts. i’ve had so many rows with boys and in the end it’s not worth it. the toxic masculinity among young boys is so strong that even the nice ones sometimes get dragged in.
RAPE JOKES MAKE ME FEAR FOR SAFETY
Olivia, 17, says:
LASt summer, after months of lockdown and our gCSEs being cancelled, i would hang out in the park drinking cider with girls and boys from five or six different schools. One afternoon, my friend got drunk and passed out. i was really worried about her when a boy came over with his friends and said, ‘Boys, there’s another girl for me to rape.’
i went mad at him but they told me to calm down, like i was overreacting. But i am sick of all the rape jokes these guys make. i don’t feel safe. it’s part of their everyday conversation — or ‘banter’, as they call it.
On another day, a friend and i were sitting in a group with some friends of friends from a private school. My mate got up to go for a pee in the bushes, and one of the boys put his arm around her and steered her towards a clump of trees. When they came back she looked upset and said she had to go home.
When i called her, she said the boy had forced her to make out with him and she didn’t know how to stop him. We found out the boys had a list of things they had to tick off, like get a b *** ** b from a girl you’ve just met. i think boys at private schools are taught to be competitive about everything, including sex — and it’s us girls who pay the price.
THEY SEND UNWANTED NUDE PICTURES TO ME
Lexi, 15, says: i jOinEd Snapchat when i was nearly 14, as it’s an easy way to connect with people you don’t know. i’ve got more than 200 followers and, while i don’t know all of them personally there’s always some connection through a schoolmate.
Something i didn’t expect, though, was to start getting unsolicited ‘d***’ photos from boys. i was shocked and each time i’ve blocked the sender.
Other boys have contacted me and asked, ‘do you send?’ this means do you send naked photos of yourself, and they can be really persistent. i’ve never done it as i know what would happen – they screenshot the photo so they can keep it and show all their friends.
i’ve talked to boys i know about this and they say, ‘Oh i’d never do that’ and ‘if anyone did that to my sister i’d be furious’, yet i heard these same guys discussing a girl’s boobs from a picture she’d sent one of them. it’s so normalised in our age group, they just don’t think about the damage they are doing or the double standards.
BOYFRIEND SHARED SNAP OF MY BOOBS
Beth, 18, says: i WAS at a mixed boarding school that only went co-ed in the past 20 years, so it definitely seemed like a boys’ school that had a few girls in it. i think the boys felt like the girls owed them something.
there was huge pressure on the younger girls to perform sex acts and send nude pictures. you felt like you’d lose your boyfriend or get labelled frigid if you didn’t.
A picture of my boobs got leaked when i was 14. My face wasn’t in it but a boy had taken a screenshot and sent it round my whole year saying it was me.
it felt like the boys could get away with it because we were at boarding school and not really being monitored the way we would be at home.
i was too embarrassed to say anything to the school, so he faced no consequences, whereas i was told i was slutty and asking for it. n NAMES have been changed to protect identities.