God, remember kissing in corridors? It’s been so long since I was a teenager that I had honestly forgotten how much snogging used to happen at school, until it was mentioned in the House of Commons this week. (I have never been a fan of the word snogging, yet as a term it’s powerfully evocative of late 1990s-early 2000s adolescence, conjuring a heady mix of Impulse body spray and Lynx Africa, the taste of Juicy Fruit chewing gum, and the sound of braces clashing.)
Teenage love is in the headlines, because of the news that there will be a “Romeo and Juliet” exemption to the new crime and policing bill obliging professionals in England, including teachers and healthcare workers, to report suspicions of child sexual abuse. The exemption for teenagers in consensual sexual relationships received cross-party support, recognising that “not all sexual activity involving under-18s is a cause for alarm or state intervention”.
This is all common sense, and similar approaches are already in place in countries such as Australia and France. That teenagers engage in sexual activity should be news to no one – obliging teachers to report every instance as a potential child sexual offence will give them an even higher workload than they face already. Instead, they can use their professional judgment. Safeguards remain in place: if there is any indication of harm or imbalance, the duty to report remains.
It confirms what many of us have long known: that often the most present threat to teenage girls are those older guys who just can’t seem to get a girlfriend their own age. You know the kind. The groomers. Guys who are 19, 20, older, who hang around the school gates in their Saxos and Corsas. In my home town, one actually went on the run with – or arguably abducted – a just turned 13-year-old girl. Others would invite underage girls to their shitty flats and ply them with alcohol. Alongside these men you had the even older ones in positions of power – at my own school, the biggest threat to teen girls was our actual headteacher (Neil Foden was eventually convicted of multiple offences).
It would be utterly absurd to put such criminal abuse and exploitation on a par with teenage fumbling. The use of Romeo and Juliet to describe the clause may at first seem rather grandiose, but isn’t that just how love, or at least lust, feels at that age? Intense, powerful, tragic even. That feeling of “If I can’t kiss him right this very second against the science block stairs, then I might as well drink poison”. I suspect its resonance is the reason it’s on the syllabus for pupils just about coming up to Juliet’s age (13). It also provides a framework for discussing these issues in class (“I know you feel like the main character in your own Shakespearean tragedy right now, but maybe put down the deadly nightshade and listen to some Lana Del Rey instead?”)
I remember how Amy, who sat next to me in English, could recite most of the play by heart. “O brawling love! O loving hate!” – I can still hear her voice now. That Romeo is saying these words about Rosaline, before he abruptly switches his affection to Juliet, was lost on us. It was in vain that our English teacher tried to get us to think about how Shakespeare might have been commenting on the fickleness of young love. There’s no telling you when you’re in the middle of it, is there? Yet there’s an argument that we should take teenagers’ romantic feelings more seriously, because they can go on to shape us.
Today’s teens are lucky, in many ways. They are not experiencing their first love, or lust, against a backdrop of alarming teenage pregnancy rates, as we were. They receive better sex education, at an earlier age, have access to more varied methods of contraception, and are generally more clued up about the biology of reproduction. We certainly weren’t making TikToks about the luteal phase – we didn’t even know what it meant, let alone how it might affect your dating behaviour.
One thing hasn’t changed, though, and that’s how vulnerable teenagers are, and how easily their hearts can be broken. We thought we were so grown up when we were fooling around at 15, going on dates to Pizza Hut, dissecting our relationships on MSN and rolling ridiculous 10-skin joints so we could hotbox caravans. We were just kids, like the teens I see walking to school or on the bus now, so impossibly young and naive, but fizzing with hormones that made you want to jump each other.
While jumping each other on a Tuesday morning outside set two maths isn’t often going to be a reportable offence, anyone who works with young people knows that their vulnerable hearts need some sort of safeguarding, too. Perhaps, alongside all the work that needs to be done in terms of consent and online misogyny and how to recognise abusive relationships, we all need formal lessons in heartbreak – after all, these years can shape our adult relationships to come and who we are. I wonder about the role they play in later infidelities, too. Most of us are happy to leave those Impulse-scented years behind us, but we all know someone who will always chase that Juicy Fruit high.
Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett is a Guardian columnist and author
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