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’.

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.

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.