Today's teenagers are struggling to cope with the expectations imposed by media images and peer pressure, the reality of low-paid work and a sexist culture.One girl for instance is too shy to speak above a whisper, but she wants to be a policewoman or a nurse. Her friend is studying to be a plumber. The most chatty of the group, is having a problem narrowing her options. "I want to be a firefighter, but I also want to be a paramedic and a midwife," she says. "The trouble is, there's just too much choice."
Slumped in the plastic chairs of a community centre, shovelling fistfuls of free sweets from the coffee bar into their mouths, the group of girls are all members of Aim High, a dance troupe set up by one of the girls and her, a 17-year-old, two years ago after they got in trouble with the police.
"My sister and I got into a car with some blokes one night and ended up getting home really late, so we told our parents we'd been snatched off the street by stranger" She half giggles, but flicks her hair over her face and refuses to look up. Before the girls knew it, their parents had called the police and a kidnap investigation had been set up.
When the shamefaced teenagers owned up, they were cautioned with wasting police time and asked why they had done it. "It was because we were bored," says the girl, who is 17. "There's nothing for us to do outside of school. My mum had youth clubs, sports stuff and drama when she was young, but we've got nothing."
With the support of the police, the Commission for Youth Enterprise and a few local groups, Aim High grew quickly from six dancers to 55. It now holds two classes a week, for young people aged eight to 18.
"It's completely changed me," says the girl. "I'm not an idiot any more, for a start. I've got plans and stuff I want to do with my life."
The assumption nowadays is that girls' lives have dramatically improved in recent decades. After all, compared with previous generations they have undreamt-of opportunities in terms of freedom and educational achievement.
How, then, to explain recent studies that have caused a groundswell of concern among experts? For, far from seeing the world as their oyster, it is becoming increasingly clear that teenage girls are a stand-alone demographic in crisis – a group about which much is assumed but little is known.
The first study that caused experts to question the quality of girls' lives was published late last year: a highly credible look at them mental health of teenage girls.
It concluded – to the surprise of academics, experts and politicians alike – that young girls were deeply depressed. It was found that, while the 15-year-old boys that were spoke to had experienced a small increase in psychological distress, the number of girls of the same age reporting mental issues from mild anxiety to more serious symptoms had jumped sharply.
The results were alarming enough: the incidence of common mental disorders including anxiety, depression and panic attacks among girls had increased from 19% to 32% (the increase for boys was just 2% to 15%).
But a study a few years later revealed an even greater leap. Girls across all social strata were now reporting mental disorders at a rate of 44%. Over a third admitted "they felt constantly under strain". Those who "felt they could not overcome their difficulties" had more than doubled to 26%. The number who said they "thought of themselves as worthless" had trebled in just 9 years from 5% to 16%.
The girls can talk endlessly about the alcohol-fuelled adventures they have had over the years, the fights they have started, the brushes with the police and the friends who have become pregnant.
"All the girls I knew at primary school were really nice and normal, then we go to secondary school and they all went a bit mad," says one. "From 12 or 13 years old, most of the girls I know just talk about sex, alcohol, sex, drugs and sex again. It's like it's this big competition and it gets everyone pretty stressed."
Her experiences echo a vast study of the well-being of youngsters across 30 industrialised nations. The recent Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development report ranked Britain's teenage girls as among the worst off for health, lifestyles and school standards relative to public spending levels.
The report found that "risky behaviour" among girls – described as a combination of drinking, smoking and teenage pregnancy – was more acute in Britain than in any of the other nations apart from Turkey and Mexico.
Teenage pregnancy is far higher in the UK than the average across the OECD's survey. The UK has the fourth highest teenage pregnancy rate after Mexico, Turkey and the United States. In Britain, more than 23 teenage girls per 1,000 gave birth in 2005.
So what's going on? Experts have said it is highly significant that this slew of research has coincided with two fundamental social upheavals: the period in which girls began to outperform boys academically, and the obsession with celebrity culture and the pressure on younger and younger girls to become sexualised.
It is hard for those brought up in the 1980s to understand the world in which young girls are now having to develop their sexual and social identities. The worst that young women of the previous generation had to contend with was a stolid, lingering patriarchy, a sniggering, Benny Hill-style of humour that was obviously already on its last legs, and Page 3 girls; a lewdness that today seems more quaint than offensive.
The sexual politics girls find themselves confronting today couldn't be more different. The sex industry has moved from the margin to the mainstream. Girls are besieged by images that glorify a pornographic view of women. There is a lap-dancing club in every town centre, six-year-old girls are bought fashion accessories adorned with the Playboy logo, Shakira writhes on all fours in a cage on MTV.
David Cameron said children – and young girls, in particular – were having their childhood stolen by a "growing, unnecessary and inappropriate commercialisation and sexualisation that is beginning far too young".
But the the sexualisation of the young has already wrought irreparable damage on a generation of young girls.
Feminism's own language of empowerment has been turned against itself. The language of empowerment has been harnessed to confuse sexual liberation with sexual objectification. The impact has been insidious and profound.
Girls today are growing up in an atmosphere of unapologetic crudity. Stripping is widely cited as a method of empowerment. A student claiming to be from either Oxford or Cambridge University published her online sex diaries last week, claiming to be, "unapologetically and unquestionably, a closet nympho". It is an era of New Promiscuity, where emotion-free sex is both expected and celebrated. We are, living in a culture defined by pornographic sensibilities, where young women are willing participants in online "games" like Assess My Breasts.
A survey of teenage girls found that more than half would consider being "glamour" models – posing almost naked for men's magazines – and a third saw Jordan as a role model.
It is no coincidence, that anorexia nervosa, the disorder of pathological self-starvation, is on the rise, with an 80% increase in hospital admissions among teenage girls over the last decade.
What we think of as 'normal' now in the way girls relate to their bodies would have been considered serious cause for concern 20 years ago. It's to do with the aspects of celebrity culture that are proffered to them – the post-Thatcherite notions of success and money as a fast track to happiness; the rapid growth of the beauty and style industries, which prey on teenage girls; the hypersexualisation of the culture; and the ambitions of the parents, who want their daughters to feel the world is their oyster."
The impact on girls struggling to comprehend both themselves and the world around them is not hard to predict. Who, after all, wouldn't feel confused and unhappy being raised in this brave new world that demands super-skinny, super-sexy and super-brainy all at the same time?
A 17-year-old from North London talks of how her string of A and A* GCSE results didn't seem enough for her parents. "They just seemed to take my exam success for granted," she said. "It was like, 'Well, you're a girl, of course you're going to do well.' I feel like I have to do more than do well at school and be a nice person to please them, but I'm not sure what else I can do. I sometimes think it might be a good idea to go off the rails for a bit, just so they do appreciate me."
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