Content note: this article contains references to and descriptions of rape, sexual assault and sexual harassment that readers may find upsetting.

Every woman knows the feeling: you’re walking along, minding your own business and suddenly you become aware of a male presence behind you. On a sunny afternoon in March 2018, I was crossing the park in my hometown in Essex, heading towards my parents’ house. The journey was one I’d made a million times before, but I felt on edge. I was sure I was being followed.

Then the teenage boy behind me shouted something that made my blood run cold: “I’m going to fuck you.” He grabbed me, shoved me up against a fence and tried to force his hand down my leggings. Within seconds, other people in the park had noticed and started sprinting towards us. The boy took off in the opposite direction, yelling over his shoulder: “I’m not done with you.”

I’m almost certain that given the chance, that boy – who was never arrested or even identified by police – would have raped me. The stars aligned for me to get away mostly unscathed, but I still feel furious. I was also shocked by how young my attacker appeared. He couldn’t have been more than 15.

But on reflection, maybe it’s not so strange that I was sexually assaulted by a child. At my secondary school, which I left in 2015, it was a daily occurrence for boys to put their hands up girls’ skirts in class, grab our bums in the corridors and openly ‘rate’ our bodies out of 10 in class. Similarly, when I made my first BBC documentary in 2021, about my devastating experience of revenge porn, I was inundated with messages from teenage girls about the sexual harassment and abuse they’d encountered from male classmates.