#teen-relationships

#teen-relationships

When I was a teenager, I arrived at a friend's house and she accidentally texted me instead of her then boyfriend. "Saoirse is here," she wrote, "we're heading to the shop, OK?" You can imagine my bewilderment when I received the text, and again when I asked if she had meant to send it to her dad or something, and was told that no, her boyfriend just likes to know where she is to make sure she's safe.

I'd had a long-term boyfriend until a couple months before prom, so Adam and I never had the chance to consider each other as anything more than friends - except for maybe what others saw: a fruit and his fly, a fag and his hag. As I caught a glimpse of him changing just feet away from me, his shirtlessness and my singleness seemed to suddenly amplify what I had hardly thought about when we were previously alone together: Adam was a boy.

The new Crime and Policing Bill is intended to protect minors by not obligating teachers to report consensual underage relationships, thus defining child sexual abuse more clearly.