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Parents' fears over sexting and abuse among teenagers


 A vivid picture of sexual assaults and harassment in teenagers' lives has been laid bare in recent months but parents rarely speak about the emotional turmoil they face.

Here, two of them tell their stories.

'You feel useless'

Andrew (not his real name) felt alone and helpless trying to comfort his daughter after she was humiliated and assaulted. Like many teenage girls, she was put under pressure, manipulated and coerced.

"She was encouraged to take semi-nude photos and then she sent them to this boy but something happened and he bandied them around the whole school."After that he says his daughter was ridiculed and harassed and it affected her mental health. "She didn't want to go to school. She didn't want to get on the bus because she had to put up with the looks, the comments."

Andrew says the school didn't seem to know how to handle it. "They've never got to the root of it all. They don't know what to do."

They suggested the family report the incident to the police but his daughter didn't want to reveal the name of the perpetrator. And it wasn't just sexting and online humiliation that pushed her mental health to the brink.

Another time when Andrew's daughter was out with friends, a group of boys bullied them and she was forced to carry out a sex act before they would let her go.

Soon after, his daughter began self-harming and one evening, he found a note that made him fear she had taken an overdose.

"It's so shocking to get something like that. Fortunately, it never happened but it was a cry for help. To think that your child is going through that sort of crisis... you feel useless; you feel like there's nothing you can do to help."

Andrew wants more to be done at a national level to tackle the problem. "It's a real worry and it's casting a long shadow over parents, families and their children's education. Obviously, we have a responsibility as parents but the help has to come from somewhere else, as well."

He suggests an independent agency should be set up to speak to children in schools about these issues, taking the pressure off teachers. And Andrew says schools should have zero tolerance when dealing with sexual harassment.

"It's like you're under a microscope at school every single day. Girls are so conscious of what they have to look like and what they have to be like."

His daughter has received counselling and is getting better, slowly building up her resilience. But he says she remains fragile, and he worries the incidents will always haunt her.

"As a parent you have that constant worry - what's going to happen today? Who is going to say what?"

'My son watched porn at 11'

Ann (not her real name) was shocked when she found her son's internet search history. "It was completely clear to me what he'd been looking at. I felt disgusted, repulsed."

It wasn't the first time she had found out that he was viewing pornography online. The first time he was only 11.

Like many families they had parental controls in place, but their now teenage son could work around them. Her older children had grown up without smartphones, but now her son could easily access pornography.

Teenage holding a phoneIMAGE COPYRIGHTGETTY IMAGES
image captionAnn worries about the impact of pornography on her son's expectations of girls and women


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