PLEASE teach young girls (& kids in general) the signs of abuse & manipulation. we need better sex ed. better mental health ed. there are so many things I & my peers could've been saved from going through SO young that we should never have gone through & accepted as "normal"

teach your kids to see signs of risky situations, teach them that it is OKAY to back away, that they shouldn't feel like they have to do something they're uncomfortable with just because they want to be liked. teach your kids not to pressure, not their friends, not their partners

teach your kids to look out for the friends, & teach them to call their friends out if they're hurting others. so many are bystanders to abuse, coercion, bullying,&manipulation bc they believe they cannot stand up to their friends - this is VERY prevalent in male friend groups

there are so many levels & layers that add on to the prevalence of these problems & how things like rape culture & toxic masculinity & enforced gender stereotypes that take a lot of time & work to unlearn, but if we actively try it will help EVERYONE of every gender & background

(& before anyone says it: I emphasized certain genders in certain parts of this because it IS more prevalent in general in relation to those, but obviously these issues can & do affect everyone. tweets just unfortunately have a very short character limit)

sorry this is out of the blue, I just keep seeing posts of people being shocked at how young kide do things they shouldn't do or go through things they shouldn't be going through & over time it's made me realize JUST how bad it was that I myself went through those things so young

& it disgusts & hurts me thinking about it, & thinking about my friends who had to "grow up" so fast & I just come back around to thinking about "what if someone had told me" "what if they had better support" "what if we all were shown examples of what is actually dangerous"

& just the fact that I really can't name a single person who doesn't have at least one shared traumatic experience or be conditioned to act/think in a way that could've been prevented by so many factors that society failed to provide or fix

I know this thread won't make a big difference & I'm just echoing what many have said but idk I just needed to rant about it because every single one of us, regardless of who you are, deserved so much better & so do all the people who will come after us

sorry for all the grammatical/autocorrect errors RIP lol