In my house any attempts at discussing boys would have been met with a serious talking to from my mother and a possible visit to the pastor after church.

As a teenager I dealt with body issues and struggled with my weight. The environment I was in didn’t help matters. Secondary school does something strange to young girls, birthing within many a capacity for bitchiness and selfishness.  Girls travel in packs, behave like lionesses in human form and are scarily aggressive. I recall relatively meek girls morphing into something unrecognisable in order to be accepted by the ever elusive ‘in crowd’.

I ended up having to forge those years on my own, making many mistakes along the way, experiencing things I’d much rather forget but overall making it out the other side relatively unscathed. Well sure, my self-esteem was in tatters, I questioned my self-worth and became very introverted but it could have been worse.

The silver lining to my teenage years is that I learnt things that I could share with my younger sisters so they would be better equipped at dealing with those torturous years than I was. The greatest lesson I learnt that I shared with them is actually a quote from Shakespeare’s Hamlet: “To thine own self be true” - which I’ve interpreted as a refusal to compromise yourself for anyone or anything. This admittedly can be a bit difficult when you’re at an age where you are still figuring out who you are. I like to think that my sisters appreciate the truths I have shared with them and hope they’ll carry it with them through the years.

I’m now a “grown up” (whatever that means) and work with young people, aged 11 to 16 . Secondary school hasn’t changed; in fact it appears to have gotten a lot worse. There are still pointless cliques, but while in my time (I feel old!) there were cool and pretty girls, smart girls, un-noticed girls, boyish girls and weird girls, now we have all of those plus emos, goth’s and future Jeremy Kyle guests.

At first glance the girls that inhabit each group seem so different, but they’re more similar than they think. Far too many have already begun to locate their self-worth in their appearance. I watch 12 year olds turning up to school in full make-up, 14 year olds who look even older than me and 16 year olds who advise me on where best to get my hair done. Even scarier than this is how they interact with the opposite sex. They flirt outrageously and seduce with all the subtlety of lap-dancers. The sad thing is that they do it because they think it is their only option. If they don’t get any attention, their behaviour deteriorates, becoming more and more provocative until I find myself blushing in their presence.