Everyday Sexism founder Laura Bates looks back in anger

34, author and activist What would your younger self make of your life today?

I don’t want there to be any more girls who grow up not knowing what feminism means

Iwas in my early 20s when I started the Everyday Sexism Project. I was desperately trying to force people to recognise that gender inequality and sexual violence are more common than they might think and they impact women’s lives on a daily basis. If I’d been able to see 10 years into the future and see that we’d still be battling to get people to acknowledge that, then I might have felt very disheartened. But if I could speak to her I would tell her to keep going. I draw strength from the hundreds of thousands of women and girls who have so briefly shared their stories with me and I won’t stop fighting for these stories to be heard.

I was a very fearful child. I was scared of everything. My parents couldn’t leave me at home alone because I was terrified of ghosts, monsters and zombies. I used to sleep with the lights on in my bedroom. If that child could see what I’m doing now she would feel a sense of pride. She couldn’t have imagined I’d be doing a job that involved receiving graphic rape and death threats on a daily basis.

Nobody ever spoke to me about feminism or the women’s movement when I was growing up. So the first question my younger self would ask if I showed her what I’m doing now would be, “What’s feminism?” And I think that says a lot about what we consider to be important and how defenceless it leaves you if you don’t learn about those structural issues.

Her main reaction if she saw me now would probably be one of profound relief. She would be able to see what she couldn’t see at the time. That those experiences that made her feel dirty, ashamed and ignored were not her fault. My teenage self would feel relieved she wasn’t the only one that could see it, and that it’s OK to feel absolutely furious.

During my time at university [Bates studied English at Cambridge] I was sexually assaulted, followed home and made to feel unsafe because I was a woman. I was lined up at a social event where my male peers appraised us with ratings out of 10.

My boyfriend won a gold statuette at his football team’s end-of-year social dinner for the “Under the Thumb” award for the player who’d wasted too much time with his girlfriend. When the team went out for a hot curry they made misogynistic jokes later about the internal burns I might get later that night. When that boyfriend broke up with me he said one of the reasons was that I couldn’t take a sexist joke.

If my university self could see me now, I hope she’d realise she was better off without that one. But also that she had every reason to feel rage in those moments. These things were so deeply normalised.

When I was sexually assaulted it never crossed my mind that it could have been reported. I was working as an actress when I started working on the Everyday Sexism Project. I loved acting as a child and had always wanted to work as an actress, but my vision of what that might look like when I was eight was very different from the reality when I ended up in that world in my early 20s.

She didn’t imagine she would be casually told to take my clothes off at auditions, receive casting breakdowns that specified only the character’s breast size, or be asked to make increasingly loud orgasm noises until they’d heard enough.

I certainly see the work that I’ve done in a long tradition of feminist consciousness raising. Unfortunately, we can see that those efforts still need to go on. There’s still a long way to go. The events of the past two weeks make me feel hopeless and hopeful at the same time. So quickly after Sarah Everard was killed we noticed #NotAllMen trending with more than 60,000 tweets. So quickly we had the backlash of “what was she doing there” and “why didn’t she take a different route” and police were telling women to stay inside.

It’s devastating to recognise that there is no country in the world that’s got this right. That one in three women on the planet will be raped or beaten in her lifetime. This is a global scourge. It’s another pandemic, but not one that gets the same headlines and response as the medical pandemic we’re living though. Yet women around the world are screaming about this and standing together to fight back. There’s a global sense of solidarity and sisterhood that will drive change. My focus for a long time has been on education and school and I still feel that’s one of the most pragmatic paths we can take. In recent years there’s been a huge and growing backlash from young men who have been radicalised online – this sense that feminism is a vast conspiracy; man-hating smuggled into the public sphere. It’s a form of grooming, but we don’t label it that.

Who could possibly have lived through the past two weeks and all they’ve entailed and not realise we have a devastating way to go? But we have to keep going. What else is there? We can’t give up now.

I don’t want there to be any more little girls who grow up not knowing what the word feminism means.

I’m fighting for an end for all of the things that happened to the little girl I was who felt confused, embarrassed and lonely. And I’ll keep on fighting until at some point there’s a generation of girls who never know what that feels like.

Laura Bates hopes to educate girls about feminism – something she never got at school