Show Respect campaign: 'We see massive amounts of stalking and harassment, hundreds of phone calls every day'

When Talia Kensit was a teenager, she began a relationship with a boy which she says became controlling and abusive. Now 27, she speaks about that time with a sense of amazement that no adults were there to help her.

Talia recalled how she and her friends, many also suffering abuse, dealt with it on their own with no support from professionals, teachers or parents. She said: “We thought of ways we could help each other — ‘you can come and stay at my house if you feel safer there’, or ‘I will walk you to the bus stop after school so you are not on your own if he tries to see you’.”

She added: “We were children but having to protect ourselves and look after each other in ways that we didn’t know how to do. We shouldn’t have been responsible for safeguarding ourselves. Teachers didn’t know what to do.

“There was a normalisation of the harm. Had there been professional support, a lot of us wouldn’t have experienced abuse for as long as we did — or maybe at all.”

Talia managed to leave that relationship with support from her friends and was determined to change things for other young women.

At 19, she set up the charity Youth Realities, which has grown into one of the leading grassroots organisations running workshops in schools and supporting girls and young women who experience abuse.

“We support them to leave abusive relationships and find safety and freedom and joy and love, and to be a young person and experience their adolescence in the way they always should have been able to,” she said. “Youth Realities started because of my lived experience but it has not stopped there.”

The charity is one of the beneficiaries of our Show Respect campaign that is seeking to tackle violence against girls by funding healthy relationships workshops in schools, an intervention that evidence shows reduces violence against girls by 17 per cent.

The charity will receive a grant of £37,646 over two years and will use the money to increase the number workshops it runs as part of its Deepin Relationships programme.

The workshops are run in mixed gender groups of year nine pupils, aged 13 and 14 and are run by young people who have been through the programme. This is an element that works well, said Talia, because the pupils relate to the young facilitators.

Talia has seen the transformation that proper information delivered through these workshops has on young people — some of whom do not realise their behaviour is causing a problem.

“Some young people don’t think it is harmful unless it is physically violent,” she said. “But we see many relationships that are abusive and use coercive control like in adult relationships. In young people that behaviour is normalised. A lot of young people who cause harm aren’t educated that what they are doing is abusive. In many cases when they find that out, they change their behaviour.”

Nekhena Mullin, 21, one of the youth facilitators who runs the workshops tackling issues of domestic violence, friendship abuse, bullying, online abuse and consent, said: “Sometimes the workshops start off quiet, with girls in particular not asking questions straight away and some of the boys laughing. But when they realise it is a safe space, they open up and engage. One of the main problems is that some young people don’t realise that what is happening to them is wrong.”

She added: “I have seen how the workshops help and I have seen change in some of the pupils we work with. They pick up on the words we use, such as gaslighting and consent. It will help them now and in the future, not just in sexual relationships but in building relationships with friends and family.”

The workshops also tackle worrying new forms of abuse that teenagers are being exposed to, which parents may know little about. For example, some girls feel pressured into giving their boyfriend their phone password, so he can check what she is posting on social media and read messages. Others are coerced to share their location to be tracked, so their partners can find out where they are at any time.

Talia also highlighted a worrying rise in cases of self-harm influenced by a partner, where people are encouraged to cut themselves or take harmful substances.

She said: “There are a whole range of abusive behaviours that are still quite unspoken about. We have seen a lot more self-harm in the past two years. We have also seen people having arguments which become so escalated that one person starts to hit themselves or headbutt things.

“We see massive amounts of stalking and harassment, hundreds of phone calls every day and people tracking people’s locations.”

She added: “We have had 11-year-old girls who have been punched by their boyfriends. We have girls who have been coerced into sending pictures of themselves and they have been shared with other people. It’s all very intense. The younger ones say ‘I love you’ after a week. They are still navigating what all these things mean. The workshops are beneficial because it is the first time they have been introduced to healthy behaviours in that context.”

As well as school workshops, Youth Realities offer one to one support for young women who have experienced abuse. One survivor with no family said the charity provided her with support when she had nowhere else to turn. After spending time in care homes, she was in an abusive relationship as teenager with an older man, and the abuse continued after she got pregnant.

She now has regular support from Youth Realities and told the Standard: “I don’t like talking to people who haven’t gone through what I have been through, I fit better with people who understand. But Youth Realities has staff members I can relate to, and they are supportive and caring.”