Eliza, 17, Liverpool

“I believe that the voting age should be lowered. I feel like if the age of consent is 16, you can fight for your country at 16, I pay tax … we shouldn’t have to go through youth parliament to be heard. We should have a right to influence what happens to us.”

Rochelle, 16, London

“I remember I went to the school disco when I had a really big afro and I wore my hair out. The next day my friend said to me, ‘My sister said you looked like a real slut when your hair was out like that.’ And that really broke me, like the amount of shame I felt … I used to love wearing my hair out, but I didn’t want to wear my hair out after that.”

Gray, 15, Blackpool

“I feel unsafe, every single day. I look more like a boy, so if I dare go outside in anything other than a tracksuit I will have teenage boys and even adults shouting at me and calling me names. It happens in broad daylight. If I go out in makeup, I cannot go 10 minutes without someone staring at me like they want to burn me. I’ve had to change my look a lot. I started expressing myself through the way I dress and makeup, but I don’t anymore because of the harassment I got. I was telling myself you have to wear sports clothes and look like everyone else. I cut my hair so short because I wanted to fit in. Living life as a non-binary person is extremely difficult.”

Violet, 13, East Riding of Yorkshire

“I won the Yorkshire [boxing] championships – they’re national championships. I got silver in the Tri-Nations, which was Scotland, Wales and England, when I boxed for the England team. And then I went to Ireland and got a gold for the Monkstown Box Cup. If I tell my teachers about boxing, they’re like, ‘Oh, do you do boxercise? Do you train once a week or something?’ I have to explain that I box for England. I think the idea of girls’ and boys’ sports is still around because boys generally play football at dinner time, and girls don’t do that. I really like boxing and [watching] rugby, but I also really like doing my hair and makeup.”

Tanya, 21, Birmingham

“Growing up as a black woman, it is quite hard to actually see someone who represents you in a higher position. So, I feel like sometimes we see ourselves a bit lower. Black women tend to have protective hairstyles such as braids or twists. I know that in schools and in the corporate world that is seen as messy and unprofessional. But if you see a white woman, for example, who would go in with her bun or something like that, it’s seen as completely normal, and it does cause that divide.”

Hanya, 16, Middlesbrough

“I usually go out and sometimes I don’t come back until really late. And with my area there’s a lot of drug dealers, and some girls getting raped … sometimes I don’t even go outside because I’m too scared to see what’s going on. So I’ve always kept myself to myself. I’ve got a really bad body image. It’s always played on my mind. And when I go out, I’ve got some lads going, ‘Oh, you’re too fat, you should lose weight,’ or, ‘You shouldn’t be wearing that.’ It’s always made me feel ashamed of who I am, and [wonder] whether or not in the future I wanted to go for lipo surgery or something like that just to reduce it … to make me look like someone they wanted me to be.”

Tayiba, 13, Birmingham

“A lot of things have always been taboo. People haven’t been talking about sex, rape, periods, how your body grows … I think it’s really important that we talk about these things because where else are we going to learn about it? We have to have somewhere where we can talk, have our opinions and not be judged. I think it should be talked about in multiple places: at school, at home, in the media. In my school there’s a lot of boys who don’t really know how to treat girls. A lot of boys in my year talk about girls like an object … like they talk about the way they look, if they’ve got a big bum or big features or stuff like that.”

Olamide, 17, London

“We are still fighting against expectations of, for a girl specifically, getting married, having children … what if someone doesn’t want to have children? With climate change at the moment, I wouldn’t blame them! Who wants to bring their child into this world? It’s always there. Like your dad saying, ‘You should get married. You should have children. You should be the nice housewives. You should know how to cook. You should know how to clean.’ Why can’t my brother? You’re not getting married to someone for her to be your slave! They’re there to be your partner, not to work for you.”

Bláithín, 16, Derry

“There’s a big misunderstanding of what a feminist is. People just assume, ‘That’s like women need to be better than men, women are better than men in all aspects, men are nothing’, and it’s just not that. They are uneducated in what it is, and before they speak they should maybe find out. [My definition of feminism is] someone that stands up for the rights of everyone and wants everyone to have equal opportunities in life. Which they should. That’s what I don’t get, because as humans I think we should all support each other. Especially as girls, we should all support each other. So why wouldn’t you want the best for the people around you?”

Kirsty, 15, and Anna, 16, Scottish Highlands

Kirsty: “If someone doesn’t have a good Instagram, people will be like, ‘Oh they’re weird, you don’t know who they are, it’s literally just like a picture of them.’ It’s like judging a book by its cover, it devalues people.”Anna: “People say, ‘Oh they’ve only got 100 followers, they’re not cool and I don’t want to talk to them, they’re weird.’ Or, ‘Did you see how many likes her photo got in 10 minutes compared to mine?’ And I just ask them, why does it matter? Why have we been programmed to care so much about a number, when it really shouldn’t matter? It doesn’t define you, it doesn’t show who you are.”

Eva, 17, Liverpool

“One of the things that I don’t really like is, obviously we’re Scouse, but the colloquialism ‘bird’ when boys call their girlfriend’s ‘bird’. I just hate it. It makes me cringe so much. And I’m like, ‘I don’t have feathers. I don’t fly. I am not a bird.’”

Abby, 18, Norfolk

“I have an elderly dog who I walk every day. He’s not a guard dog, but if someone was to come near me, he’d be quite angry towards them. If there are groups of people hanging around, occasionally they’ll see me and start walking towards me, and I’ll change my route, walk around the park instead of walking through it, and then quickly cut back to my road to get away from them. As soon as I’ve turned that corner and my house is in sight, I know I’m safe. Occasionally, you’ll have that one person who’s just sitting at the back [of the bus] and is staring at you. And occasionally, they’ll make their way and sit right next to you and just start talking to you … but I try my best to sit right by the driver, so he can see, or she can see what’s happening.”

Hannah, 15, Scottish Highlands

“I think feminism is hugely important right now. But there are a lot of people that have been saying things like, ‘Oh it’s man-hating’ and ‘Everyone’s already equal’ but it’s not true. And I feel like there needs to be more awareness. It’s as if they’re scared that women will become superior and treat men the way men have treated women for centuries. I think it’s [because] men have always been higher up than women and they’re probably scared of the unknown.”

Emily, 16, Bridlington

“Boys will look at you differently on a sports team than they would just hanging about with your friends. People just assume you’re a tomboy. It’s like the female footballer, butch female stereotype … which I got for a while. People say be yourself and wear what you’re comfortable in and look how you want to look, but then people will say ‘You look like a man’ when you have big shoulders.”

Clare, 18, County Armagh

“You’re allowed to be bigger, but you can only be bigger in a certain way. And on Instagram, influencers say, ‘Here is some tea I will tell you about so that you can be bigger in a certain way.’ I think capitalism has just grabbed on to body image and it’s just ballooned into this moneymaking scheme.”

Macey, 16, Birmingham

“My school currently is a high-achieving girls’ school, so everything is pushed. Girls are applying to be doctors at Cambridge and nobody’s not doing a degree at a good university. But in secondary school it was just like ‘get in and get out’. We did have events and activities based around STEM, which was quite good, and we’d go to the University of Birmingham and do classes. I think we’re quite lucky because a lot of schools don’t get that opportunity. Luckily I had a parent who could help me find what I wanted to do. But if you don’t have those role models in your life to help you, it’s really difficult.”

Hollie, 15, Merthyr Tydfil in Wales

“I wouldn’t really walk around the streets on my own now because of the stories we hear, and people being harassed in the streets, and, you know, all the different alleys. It makes me feel ashamed to not be able to go out of my own house, into my own village on my own, because it’s that thought constantly in the back of your head – what’s going to happen if we go out?”

Rachel, 15, Ards and North Down

“The biggest challenge I have being a girl here in Northern Ireland would be pay gaps. Ever since I was in P-6, I’ve always said I want to be a dentist when I’m older, no compromise. And then I looked up statistics recently and it turns out that there is a giant pay gap this year alone … despite the fact that the majority of people going into local universities are female for dentistry. It makes me feel like no matter how hard I’m going to work, there could be a guy beside me, not working nearly as hard, he’s going to get the exact same rewards. I think that girls should be told from a younger age to pursue interests like technology and maths, but equally that boys should be allowed to pursue and make art and music and drama.”

Paige, 21, East Riding of Yorkshire

“All my friends have plastic surgery. They all have their lips done, and their nose done, and their jaw done. But I’ve never been that one [girl] myself. I think it started when they were about 18, so two or three years ago now. I remember my friend got her lips done, but she only got a couple of millimetres, or whatever it is. She was like, ‘That’s it.’ Quite a few of my other friends have gotten their jaws done. You can actually get them on finance, so they’re being paid for monthly.”

Elsa, 16, Scottish Highlands.

“Everything has to follow with a brand; you have to create your own image and your own identity, which isn’t normally true at all. It’s like a whole aesthetic, which often isn’t your real personality. Speaking to and seeing someone in person is often incredibly different to how you expect them to be when you see them online. In reality I don’t have a massive amount of followers, I have 500 and something, whereas girls we know have got 2,000. It seems so bizarre to want verification, or to be appreciated by people who don’t know you. You want likes from people you’ve never met before that go to other schools and you’re never going to see in your life. You want them to like your pictures and you want them to approve it.”

Megan, 17, Inverness

“The other thing with sex education was nobody ever talks about porn. We had [a speaker] come in to do the porn talk the other day. I remember I was actually quite amused watching the boys who were clearly porn watchers; they had no idea just how the industry exploited women, and they were the ones that were asking all the questions. [Porn is] where boys are getting their sex tips from, and it’s just so unrealistic.”

Dona, 17, Liverpool

“I think there’s an unclear understanding of what it means to be a British citizen and still have ethnic diversity. Because some people have come to me and gone, ‘Oh no, you’re not British.’ I’ve tried to explain, ‘I was born in Saudi Arabia. I grew up in India for the first three years, and then I came to the UK.’ But I still class myself as being a British citizen. I have a British passport. I am a British citizen. That’s what I feel.”

Esther, 17, London

“On the whole I don’t [feel safe in London] because of the way I present, the way I have my gender expression set up [as a masculine female]. It’s caused problems for me. Even on public transport, when I go into certain spaces, even walking where we are now, I don’t feel safe because of the way people look at black youths, like we’re criminals. I’m more scared for my nephews, my cousins, growing up now. They’re younger than me and I know they’re good boys. They’re smart, intelligent, funny, charismatic and they’re going to be stereotyped because of institutionalised racism.”

Nicola, 20, Blackpool

“If you were a girl and you picked engineering then the boys took the mick, because they think, ‘Oh, that’s a boys’ thing.’ Sometimes the teachers didn’t even let girls on it. In our high school I don’t think one girl went on that course because it was for boys; all the girls did catering. I thought of engineering in the beginning, but when you saw all the boys thinking that, I thought no, I’ll do catering with my mates. I’ve not known one girl do it because of the boys.”

Pixie, 14, Scottish Highlands

“I know a lot of guys who are 19, 20, and will be messaging 14-, 15-year-old girls asking them for nudes. And I don’t feel like they can say no, like it’s something they have to do even though it’s not. Cat-calling of younger girls is seen as normal. This whole idea of older men with younger girls, that’s seen as normal, even though it’s really not, it’s really creepy. They could try and do more to check people’s ages on dating apps because it is really dodgy having younger people on these apps. A lot of the things that people say on these apps are really sexual and inappropriate, and if you’re exposing young kids to it, that’s really weird.”