We help them experience growing up like any teenager

Controlling and coercive behaviour is all too common for many schoolgirls with boyfriends today. Talia Kensit tells Anna Davis how she set about tackling it

- Anna Davis

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.