FOR most teenagers, their first romance is a whirlwind of tender moments they will look back on with nostalgic fondness.
But, for an East Yorkshire teenager, the relationship she shared with a classmate left her a shell of her former self after he raped her when they were both just 14 years old.
Now 19, the student fears she is one of hundreds of teenage victims in schools across the country and has launched a campaign to make sexual abuse awareness a compulsory part of education.
"No one knew what had happened to me for years," she said. "I just wish we had been taught about it because, if we had, I would have said something so much sooner than I did.
"At school, you always have alcohol and drugs talks – these are issues but, they are not the only ones, there are bigger ones, such as sexual abuse and consent. These issues couldn't be more urgent."
The girl, who did not want to be named, had been going out with the boy for nine months and was a virgin when he forced himself on her and raped her.
Traumatised by what he did, she ended the relationship immediately but did not tell anyone why for four years.
Carrying the secret alone, she spiralled into a pit of depression and self-harming. She suffered with bulimia and post traumatic stress disorder.
Class bullies branded her a "slag" for ending the relationship so soon after sex and her behaviour deteriorated at school.
"He was my first boyfriend, my first everything," she said. "I was only 14 and I didn't want sex, not at that age.
"I didn't fully understand what had happened, I just knew how it made me feel but, because of the way it happened, I knew he knew what he had done. There was no way he didn't know that he had raped me."
Currently, schools are taught about the legal issues surrounding sexual relationships and how to avoid exploitation and abuse, but it is up to the teachers to decide how much detail they go into.
The teenager argues many do not go far enough and that issues, such as consent and what constitutes sexual abuse and violence, should be a mandatory part of the curriculum.
"It must be happening to teenagers all the time but, at that age, you don't know enough or feel confident to say anything," she said.
"I would have been much more likely to speak to my teacher if I had been taught about it."
Despite her ordeal, she managed to finish her education at Winifred Holtby Academy and Hull College and has just completed her first year at Northumbria University, studying law.
It was there she decided to finally go to the police over the rape. However, no charges have ever been brought against her ex-boyfriend after Humberside Police said there was not enough evidence.
The teenager has been supported by her family. She finally confided in her parents just two weeks before she left home to study.
"I was meant to be going to work," she said. "I had rang my mum to see if she was going to be in when I got back and she told me she wouldn't be. Then I just started to panic and crying down the phone.
"All I knew is that I needed to tell my mum and dad everything.
"I was freaking out. All I kept thinking was that I needed to tell them before I went to uni.
"They told me to stay where I was and that they were coming to get me.
"Dad's face was just horrible. I was crying, mum was really upset. We were all in the car, on the driveway. Mum just hugged me for ages.
"They asked me if I felt better for telling them but I didn't because, up until then, I genuinely thought I was never going to tell them.
"In my head, they were never going to know."
After discovering no action was going to be taken against her ex-boyfriend, she launched the petition, which she hopes to present to David Cameron.
She also has a meeting scheduled with Humberside police and crime commissioner Matthew Grove.
"The campaign is a huge thing for me to do because it is something that needs to be done but it is also to helping me," she said. "It feels like I am actually doing something about what happened.
"People are going through what I went through all over the world. I just wish someone had campaigned before it was me.
"The thought that other people are going through it is all I think about.
"At least something is going to come out of this now."
• The teenager is encouraging people to sign the petition she has set up at change.org.
