i got pressured to send nudes At 15. I had been asked to send an underwear pic, and this guy sent me a dick pic back. He then kept sending and asking me to send something in return. Eventually i did, But i didnt want to. I felt pressured die to the fact he had sent me things. I had done this before, however the guy didnt send me anything and just told me to send him things, Everyday, And i gave up saying no. These havent been leaked, but every day im thinking, Why did i do it? What happens if it does? I dont want people to find out, and i dont want other people to feel like this and live their life in fear. Im currently at the point of suicidal thoughts due to this, and i Just hope it will get better. I regret it all and i quite frankly wish this didnt happen and i could message my male friends without the fear of them asking for or sending pictures.

In secondary school (around age 14), it was very common to be asked for nude/explicit images from boys the same age or older. Using the game truth or dare was a very popular way of asking as if you said no to the dare you would be called vulgar names. If any girls did send the images they would typically end up on a snapchat accounts story that was dedicated to sharing these images to 'bait' girls out.

I was forced to send nudes to a boy younger than me when I was 15. He would always beg and beg and then threatened to kill himself as a last resort and I caved. I've felt disgusted and disappointed with myself ever since its always on my mind. He was racist and sexist towards me I only turned 18 last year. I feel sick and felt that I had to send those pictures otherwise he'd kill himself I hate myself for doing this and I worry about my future jobs from now on. I became quite ill and depressed after that because I just hated what I did. I haven't sent any after that day and I won't again.

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There was at least 1 ‘send nudes’ scandal every year at secondary school, but the school only ever punished the girls, never the boys who’d begged for and shared them. And after the girls had been expelled, their images could go round again at their new schools, they could never catch a break. Why weren’t the boys punished? The one time a boy was caught sending nudes to every girl in our school, he wasn’t expelled, it was laughed off as a ‘oh boys will do silly things’.

Porn from an early age affected my self respect. I didn’t know that porn wasn’t realistic and thought that I had to do the things these women did. It probably comes as no surprise then to say that I didn’t enjoy sexual activity until I was much older and started setting boundaries and prioritising my own pleasure. I look back on some of my past behaviour and am ashamed. Why did I ever think I existed to serve men?

When I was 13 a man asked me online if I masturbated. I was embarrassed and pressured and ashamed at the time because I didn’t know it was normal, and I told him that I did. He asked for more graphic details and then told me that he got off imagining it.

At the age of 8 I was exposed to pornography and through that became addicted. This lead to me being punished for viewing these materials and altering how I viewed sex. At 11 when I started secondary school, where social media was everyone’s everything, I was begged by boys I thought I loved for pictures of myself as a way to show them I love them back. This lead to those pictures being sent to group chats, posted online and shared in public. A private thing became so public and out of my control, and when I was a child. It was a warped way of love but I was never taught what love was. I shouldn’t of needed to do that for affection but the exploitation to sex from so young has changed my perception of everything in that category, that that’s what I thought I needed to show and receive love, do the things and be the things that I’ve seen because that’s all I knew. I am now 21 and still living with the damage from these issues, and the aftermath of all of these problems, using therapy and my own strength to rebuild my life and make my younger self proud of the woman I am going to become after all she has suffered and that she has watch me suffer.

I was in a stable relationship during covid, so I thought. I met my first boyfriend through a friend of a friend at school, at first it was going well, we were young and happy during Covid, then things took a spiral, I got asked to send nudes. I wasn’t comfortable at first but I did it anyways because I trusted him. Later on in the years I got told many stories about him, “he raped me” was a major thing i got told. At first I thought it was a lie, then I found out it was the truth. When I said no I got guilt tripped into “you don’t love me” it ruined me as a person now I still get flashbacks and worried even though I’m in a happy relationship now. He had phases of taking photos of us having sex or saving screenshots me

I thought this was a normal relationship. Every night i would get sent photo after photo of explicit images which I thought was a normal relationship, I got found out and it ruined my life and made me feel insecure.

When I was in primary school, I was friends with a girl who had obviously been sexually assaulted at some point. Obviously, me being 9 I didn’t know that. Anyway she introduced me to sexual content when I was only 9 and She would tell me in detail everything and Me being young I didn’t even know what she was talking about until one day I decided to open my ipad and search for these videos. I was scared and I immediately ran to the bathroom crying and shaking I remember I didnt know what was happening and what I was feeling I thought I was going to wet myself And since then Ive never indulged in anything sexually because it makes me sick.

A couple of months ago I got in a relationship with this guy in my school who at first I thought he was really sweet But as I got comfortable I found out he was actually kind of messed up. It started of with him sending me gore videos he’d found online which made me feel really disturbed as I’d been exposed to media like that in the past. It almost seemed like it was normal to him and he found it funny. After a while I felt trapped in the relationship with him and the relationship became sexual very quickly at first It wasnt so bad but then it became obsessive and He had very weird kinks which he’d seen online by watching porn. He would want to play weird games with me and Offen used violence when I wasn’t comfortable with it But I didn’t want to make him mad. Now we’ve broken up And i realised how much I didn’t know about him. He was in discord servers which promoted terrorism, He was in racist groupchats And he was into r**e and p**o pornography which is really disturbing and shocking after you trusted someone so much to be betrayed Like that.

growing up I had a lot of trouble with expressing myself and I found it difficult to open up with how I really felt I had a kinda small friendship group so I reached out to people online. My self esteem was really low so when I was 12 I used to pretend to be someone I wasnt with my fake persona of a 17 year old boy. I wanted to be recognised so I would make people feel sorry for me I made a lot of friends and I was constantly texting them I became reliant on them Now im older I know what I did was wrong and I should have just spoken to people about How I really felt but I didn’t feel comfortable.

Growing up online has affected in many different ways. For me it has given me opportunities to create new ideas and pursue my hobbies online. However, I know many people who have been caught up in issues such as online bullying and many more for example, I know someone who has had many issues for having access to indecent and troubling content at the age of only fourteen. A thing I’ve noticed is that instead of realising and processing my day or week I used go and scroll on TikTok to pass the time but now I’ve become interested in music I’ve started to use my time wisely on screens and be productive. I think children should be using screens to carry out hobbies and interests instead of doom scrolling.

I started using social media as we know it now when I was 13, in 2009 - I think this was maybe the worst time, as I was one step ahead of my parents and not much was known about the harm to young people at that point. I had been using online messaging platforms and forums from a younger age however; my dad taught me how to use the computer from infancy, and after my parents divorce when I was 8 it became an escape (and something that was consistent between both their houses).

To be quite candid, I used to be a misogynist loser incel internet kid, making shit memes about women being boring so I could get 40,000 likes on Reddit and a nice little dopamine hit. I understand the infrastructure though which a misogynistic ideology promulgates, and the reasons for which a young man might find that ideology appealing.

When I was in school, everyone was addicted to their phones, social media especially. I would spend hours a day scrolling through Instagram. Every time I was bored or a bit low, I would open Instagram and end up scrolling through other people’s posts for hours, becoming a constant loop. Instead of helping me, it made me feel worse, although I didn’t realise it at the time. I would see people living their lives that would seem way more exciting than my own. Seeing how people would use social media to show off and glamorise their lives affected my self-worth and confidence, especially revolving around body images.

Growing up, watching pornography seemed to be the normal thing. Porn was casually talked about at school all my friends would watch it and openly admit that they did so. Porn was introduced to me from a very young age, like most of my friends, through social media (Instagram etc.). I watched it throughout secondary school, finding it extremely hard to give up. It affected my perception of sex from a very early age, with little education and discussion at school what the realistic expectations should have been.

When I was younger, I quickly realized that going online and immersing myself in that world allowed me to escape the external issues in my life. Social media offered countless gateways to further distraction - pornography, for example, was so easily accessible that I could stumble upon it without even looking, just by scrolling through platforms like Instagram or Twitter. Unaware of the dangers of falling into these rabbit holes, I grew increasingly dependent on them, which ultimately made it difficult for me to focus and apply myself to anything. Over time, I developed a distorted view of sex, relationships, and even the world around me, as I became more disengaged from reality. It was such an effortless distraction that I failed to recognize the importance of creating real-life experiences to develop your mind, or appreciating the time of my childhood. If I could go back, I would seek to fully understand the lasting costs this has on my mental health, so that I would no longer rely on my phone, or any social media, to avoid depression and stress.

We should not have an escape from reality in our pockets at all times. When I get depressed, I absorb my mind in a video. Socially timid?… I answer mundane texts. Dreading an assignment?…binge boxsets. Instead of facing my problems, I hide behind a screen. During my most depressed periods I have used screens to avoid my own mind. It has not felt a safe place to be - my internal monologue turned hostile. So I hide from it in a screen. When I watch youtube videos or scroll through reels - I am not consciously aware of myself, or my situation. My mind is silent. I exist behind a screen. The issue is that my problems don’t dissipate with my attention elsewhere. Unsupervised, they have grown to insurmountable sizes in my mind and I have become more apprehensive of them. This is no surprise. Cognitive behavioural psychology tells us how phobias work. We have an unpleasant experience of something, so we avoid it. The subsequent feeling of safety reinforces the belief that it is something to steer clear of. To break these phobias, we must be exposed to the anxiety-inducing stimuli and eventually learn it is not the threat we believe it to be. If there are distressing aspects in life, they must be tackled - they cannot be hidden from.We have been called the anxious generation and I see why. Screens offer a tantalising means of avoiding something frightening, right in your pocket.