It is one of the hottest days of the year in the west Dublin suburb of Castleknock, and a teenage girl is in her back garden playing football with her friends.
Her friends, though, are not actually in the garden with her; they are in their own homes, their own back gardens, playing keepie-uppies over video call.
This is a regular occurrence, 13-year-old Myla Jain says, with the group chat of 10 classmates convening over video call most evenings once they get home from school.
“I don’t mind being with them on a call, but it’s probably better in person,” she says.
That hunger for physical connection is clear. She loves going to Blanchardstown shopping centre with her friends, watching films, and says she can’t wait to be old enough to go to house parties.
She plays basketball with her next-door neighbour in their garden, she loves hockey and plays most evenings after school.
But like many girls her age in Ireland, so much of her life is lived on Snapchat, TikTok and Instagram.
The music she listens to is driven by what she hears on viral videos, “snap streaks” cannot be broken, and the 10-person group chat is alive every evening and weekend.
The increasingly pervasive presence of social media in the lives of female teenagers is one of the strongest themes we came across when we asked them what it was like to grow up in Ireland.
They also spoke about the skewed perceptions of consent held by some of their male peers, their impression of what it meant to be a woman in the modern world, the importance of their friendships and the pressures of the education system here.
This is their story of girlhood.
Becoming a woman
Saoirse McHugh: ‘I feel like this is such a universal experience for women.’ Photograph: Daragh Mc Sweeney/Provision
There were three big milestones in 19-year-old Saoirse McHugh’s life that made her feel she was on her way to becoming a woman: getting her first period; having a relationship with a boy; and sitting her first State exam.
“I feel like when you’re young, you’re so excited to grow up, you’re so excited to have more independence and freedom and be mature, but when I got older and all these other events started happening, me entering womanhood, I felt more of a growing feeling of dread,” she says.
Saoirse cites the example of having to think about what college course and future career she wanted to do when she was just 15.
But there was also the unwanted male attention that came with the shift into womanhood. “It’s very scary with some of the experiences you have, especially as a teenage girl,” she says.
She recounts an encounter in her housing estate in Bishopstown, Cork, when she was 12.
It was 2019 and she was walking her dog, Miggledy (named after then president Michael D Higgins), around her estate.
It was a peaceful, quiet area with a lot of elderly residents, and everyone assumed it was safe enough for a girl of her age to walk around on a summer evening.
There was a pub in the estate, and she noticed something after going past it.
“I remember I was passing by the pub to go back to my house, and this man started following me, and he followed me all the way to my house,” Saoirse says.
“I was terrified, I had this feeling in my gut that felt like my stomach was sinking, it was so scary. He was asking me to get in a taxi with him and go to town, and I’m very clearly a 12-year-old child.”
[ Most Irish adults favour social media ban for under-16s, poll saysOpens in new window ]
She made it back inside her house and told her parents, who called the gardaí, but no prosecution came of it.
“That was the youngest I can remember, but there’s been other moments, where I’m sitting on the bus and there’s grown men making comments. I feel like this is such a universal experience for women, that you have some horrible, jarring, scary experience, and then you just go on with your day like nothing happened,” she says.
Bel Aghedo is an 18-year-old law student who was born in Dublin to Nigerian parents. She was quite young when she realised they held certain expectations of what it meant to be a woman in the world: “I grew up to believe that women take care of everything, and women never ask for help,” Bel says.
She was not allowed to play outside with other children in her estate, with the constant refrain of “because you’re a girl” given as the reason.
Bel Aghedo, 18 – Photo: supplied
When she started her first part-time job in Penneys, she says she was encouraged to send money to her older brothers who were at university in Britain.
When it was her turn to go to college, she had to work part-time and get a scholarship to attend her course at the University of Galway.
“I think I was a lonely kid, because I really was left alone by myself all the time, like literally all the time.”
Her phone, she says, became a refuge from the loneliness.
Social media
Bel was just seven years of age when she got her first phone, and an Instagram account followed almost immediately.
Within weeks, she was receiving “creepy” messages from unknown men who were asking her to send them pictures of herself, and to meet up. This progressed to them sending her sexualised images of themselves.
“They were sending me different videos of themselves doing stuff that they probably shouldn’t send to anyone, let alone a child. Maybe they didn’t realise what age I was, but in my bio it did say: I’m Bel, I’m seven years old and I love Ariana Grande.”
She was not taught about digital safety in school, she says, and found it far too easy to access social media and all its dangers.
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Kate Macadam, an 18-year-old Leaving Certificate student from Greystones, Co Wicklow, kept away from social media for longer.
“I got a phone when I was 10, but it didn’t do anything. It had a really bad camera, one game, and WhatsApp, that was it. I only used it to text my parents and grandparents. I couldn’t have any social media. I didn’t get Snapchat until I was 14 or 15.
“At the time I wasn’t happy with my parents, but I’m grateful now, to be honest. I was also lucky because the people I was closest with didn’t have social media either, so I never felt that pressure to have TikTok or Instagram, because they weren’t on it, so I didn’t really feel like I was missing out,” Kate says.
She saw the negative effects social media was having on some kids around her, and its addictive nature. “If you get one app, you want all the other apps,” Kate says.
“I noticed everything kind of felt like it had to be documented. People were a little less present in the moment, everything had to be put on a private story or put on an Instagram story, and instead of actually just being with your friends.”
‘I feel like a lot of the progress that is made within the schools gets completely undone by social media’
— Saoirse McHugh
For Saoirse, she began to notice the impact that toxic masculinity on social media was having on some boys she knew.
“A lot of the lads would have been following the likes of Andrew Tate or influencers like that, and even if they’re not following it they still see it on their feed because of the way the algorithm works, which targets teenage boys and pushes some of this type of content on them.”
Tate is a British-American influencer and self-proclaimed misogynist who targets young men and boys with his sexist ideologies on social media platforms.
Saoirse believes the majority of boys in her year in secondary school would have been consuming Tate’s material online, with some repeating the misogynistic rhetoric.
She recounts being on a bus with other students when some used a text-to-speech app on a speaker to play sexualised, demeaning jokes about some of the girls on the bus.
“One guy actively got up and removed himself from that situation and sat at the front, so it isn’t a case of ‘all hope is lost’,” Saoirse says, though she felt it was overall a very distressing situation for the girls on the bus.
Consent
Kate Macadam, an 18-year-old Leaving Certificate student from Greystones, Co Wicklow. Photograph: Natalia Campos
When the older girls we spoke to were asked what they understood consent to mean, they all answered similarly.
It was not just an absence of “no”; nor was it simply a “yes”. It was an enthusiastic “yes”, communicated very clearly and freely given, they said.
“I think both the boys and the girls in my life kind of have a good idea about it,” Kate says.
“In general I think my age group is quite aware of it. As a generation we have been exposed to a lot of social media stuff about, like, sexual assault or rape, and personally I know that it would have generated conversations with people in my life about it.
“I don’t know if it’s the same for everyone, but I think because it’s being talked about, I think people are more aware of it.”
Bel says her class was taught about contraception, transgender people’s experience and sexually transmitted infections, but she doesn’t remember many conversations around consent.
She recalls a boy bantering about it, with one of them asking a teacher: “‘Say if I really, really, really wanted Belle to have my babies, but she didn’t want to have my babies, but I really, really wanted to, would that be right?’”
She couldn’t tell if he was joking or not, but took from it all that she needed to protect herself and avoid getting into potentially dangerous situations.
“I made myself very clear, and no one really kind of messed with me,” she says.
Saoirse says there were “definitely moments where consent to certain activities wasn’t fully given”.
This has affected the relationships she has had since, she says, with them feeling “nerve-wracking” and requiring her to “set clear boundaries”. However, she is happy now with a new boyfriend.
“I went into a relationship with the most understanding person, and it completely helped me in my journey of healing and my journey of processing what happened, but if I hadn’t had that support from my boyfriend, then I don’t know where I’d be now,” Saoirse says.
‘I didn’t realise how much of a big part my friends played in my life before they were gone’
— Bel Aghedo
While she believes the issue of consent is addressed in schools and among young people a lot more now than in previous generations, social media has threatened that progress.
“I feel like a lot of the progress that is made within the schools gets completely undone by social media. So many young boys will be sitting in school, learning about consent, and then they’ll go home and spend hours consuming content by far-right men, telling them to dominate,” she says.
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“They might be watching porn which is glorifying abuse and they’ll have a completely twisted vision in their head of what consent is because they’re consuming all of this harmful content online, which is unregulated, unfiltered.”
Sisterhood
Platonic friendships are very important to all of these teenagers, with some of their fondest, happiest memories being of time spent with other girls.
For Kate, getting ready to go to discos was often more fun than the disco itself.
“It’s always kind of a ritual in itself for teenage girls in Ireland, that you go to your friend’s house and put music on, and you get ready together. It was fun, you know? You wanted to be with your friends,” she says.
“I found it difficult in primary school to have friends that were girls, so it was just nice to have a bit of sisterhood and be together, and I still love doing that now with my friends.”
For Bel, the reintegration into school after the Covid lockdowns was difficult. She started secondary school when teaching was done virtually, and had a group of about 12 friends with whom she spoke regularly online.
When they got back into the classroom those friendships did not always hold up, and she found that very isolating.
“I stopped coming to school when I didn’t have friends, because I was just sick of doing things by myself all the time. It was really hard, just little things like having someone to sit with at lunch, or having someone to sit beside in a class. I didn’t realise how much of a big part my friends played in my life before they were gone,” Bel says.
She is happier now in college; things have changed for the better.
Generations
Myla Jain and her mother, Ridhi, who says she wishes she could take social media away from children. Photograph: Natalia Campos
Myla is clearly a very sociable, energetic young girl who craves time with her friends either online or in person.
Her phone helps her stay connected to her friends over the summer, when they’re not in school, she says.
But Myla’s mother, Ridhi, says she wishes she could take social media away from children.
When she was a girl growing up in India, she played on the roads with her friends in the evening, so “whoever lived on the lane was our friends”.
“It was a much simpler life, but we were so creative because of boredom. I think these days they’re not bored, ever, so they’re not thinking outside the box, they just do the usual stuff. We used to do a lot more creative stuff. We’d have our own little festival in the garden if we were too bored, things like that,” Ridhi says.
She wonders if children’s friendships now are more shallow, because it can be difficult to develop the same level of connection over the phone.
“I feel I miss it for them, the childhood we had, but they’ll never know. I wish they could have that,” Ridhi says.
Myla was given a phone as a young girl when the family first travelled home to India, and they wanted her to be contactable. She ended up keeping it after that, and Ridhi regrets that decision.
“I wish I hadn’t. I wish I had waited. I know certain countries are now banning social media for kids under 16. I would pay the Government here to do it tomorrow.”