At sixteen, the world is supposed to be full of possibility. For Faustine Petron, it was a time of ambition and promise: she was going to nail her A-levels, walk through the gates of the University of Cambridge, and study politics, driven by a deep sense of justice and a fiercely feminist spirit. But instead of looking forward to lecture halls and debates, she found herself trapped in a nightmare she couldn’t name. Her first serious relationship, as a college student, began with the usual thrill of young love, but within six months it had curdled into something terrifying. Her boyfriend subjected her to extreme violence and trauma. He controlled who she could see, where she could go, what she could say. He called her names designed to erode her confidence, and he systematically dismantled the person she had been. She stopped talking about Cambridge, because whenever she mentioned it he would explode, insisting there was no way she was going. Looking back now, at twenty-six, Faustine can see clearly what was happening: she was being abused. But at the time, she didn’t have the words. She had been almost brainwashed into believing this was just how relationships worked. She would film her surroundings to prove to him she wasn’t somewhere she shouldn’t be, as if that were normal. It wasn’t until later, after years of damage, that she understood: compulsory relationships and sex education in England stops at sixteen, just at the age when teenagers are starting to put the theory into practice. And no one had ever taught her what abuse actually looks like.
Faustine’s story is not rare. It is a pattern repeated in bedrooms, hallways, and phone screens across the country. But her survival and her fury have turned into a campaign. She founded Make It Mandatory, a group demanding that relationship education be available to every young person up to the age of eighteen. Alongside the charity Killed Women and a cross-party group of MPs, she is backing the Relationships and Sex Education (Further Education Sector) Bill, a piece of legislation that would close the dangerous gap that leaves sixteen- to eighteen-year-olds to navigate the most intense and potentially devastating years of their emotional lives with no compulsory support. The current law stops at sixteen, which means a young person in sixth form or a college bricklaying course can spend two crucial years learning calculus or carpentry while receiving zero structured guidance on consent, coercive control, or healthy love. As Faustine says, she was so young she didn’t have the language to understand that what he was doing to her was abusive. If she had known, she says, she would have left six months in. Six months less trauma. Six months less fear. Six months closer to the Cambridge dream. Instead, her life was derailed. This is why the bill matters: not as a bureaucratic tweak to the curriculum, but as a lifeline. It would make relationship and sex education a timetabled part of learning for all sixteen- to eighteen-year-olds, whether they are studying A-levels or learning a trade, ensuring that young people are not left to learn about love through pain, shame, and silence.
Why does the age of sixteen matter so much? Because it is the moment when many teenagers begin to move into adult life: they start college, they date more seriously, they spend more time alone with partners. It is also, as Alistair Strathern MP points out, the age when young people face the highest rates of domestic abuse. The MP, who introduced the bill to parliament, says compulsory relationships and sex education currently ends just as young people gain greater independence and face more serious relationships. Meanwhile, the world around them has changed. Violent pornography and harmful online content fill the void left by the withdrawal of lessons. Social media algorithms feed young minds distorted messages about masculinity, possession, and control. Emerging technologies create new opportunities for surveillance and harassment, from tracking apps to revenge porn. Without a classroom counterweight to all of this, teenagers are left to piece together their understanding of relationships from the most toxic sources imaginable. The bill would fix this by making sure the lessons are built into timetables for every sixteen- to eighteen-year-old, including those doing practical courses such as bricklaying or hairdressing. Because no young person deserves to be let go at the exact moment they need support the most. We teach young people to drive before handing them the keys. We teach them to cook, to budget, to pass exams. But when it comes to love—the thing that can make or break their mental health, their safety, their future—we often leave them alone in the dark. Two extra years of education could be the difference between recognizing the warning signs of an abusive partner and being drawn into a cycle of violence that can take years, or even decades, to escape.
The cost of this failure can be fatal. Carole Gould knows this in the most unbearable way possible. Her seventeen-year-old daughter, Ellie, was stabbed to death by her boyfriend. Ellie was not a child who would have ignored warnings; she was a beloved daughter with her whole life ahead of her. But the coercive control she experienced in her first relationship was so subtle, so insidious, that the people who loved her most didn’t see the danger until it was too late. As Carole puts it, as a mother you just want to protect your child. Yet she and her family, her teachers, everyone around Ellie, failed to recognize the red flags and the danger she was in. This is not a failure of love. It is a failure of education. Young people cannot recognize what they have never been taught. They cannot name a pattern of behavior as abuse if no adult has ever shown them what abuse looks like in real life. They cannot understand that jealousy is not romance, that possessiveness is not devotion, that control is not care. This is why Carole now backs the bill. She wants Ellie’s death to mean something. She wants every teenager to be equipped with the tools to see the warning signs before their story ends the same way. We can all hope that our children will never meet anyone who wants to hurt them. But hope is not a strategy. Education is. If Ellie had been taught to recognize the subtle signs of coercive control—the way an abuser isolates you from friends, monitors your phone, plays on your insecurities, and makes you feel like you’re the one to blame—things might have been different. No bill can bring her back. But it can save other daughters, other sons, other families from the same grief.
Jess Phillips MP knows the scale of the problem all too well. Having spent years fighting violence against women and girls, she is clear-eyed about what it takes to end it: we cannot simply pick up the pieces after abuse has happened. We must do everything we can to prevent it from happening at all. That means changing the culture and teaching young people to recognize the warning signs before it’s too late. The government’s Violence Against Women and Girls Strategy commits to halving VAWG within a decade, but as Phillips says, that cannot be achieved without education. It is unacceptable, she argues, that compulsory relationships and sex education ends at sixteen, when young people are most vulnerable. This bill is a vital step towards ensuring young people can recognize the signs of abuse. Her words echo the urgency of the moment. Violence against women is not a private tragedy or a collection of isolated incidents; it is a relentless epidemic, a national emergency. Metro recognized this with the launch of the This Is Not Right campaign on November 25, 2024, working with partners at Women’s Aid to shine a light on the sheer scale of the crisis. The campaign provides a platform for survivors, amplifies their voices, and pushes for the systemic changes that will keep women safe. Changing the law on sex education is exactly the kind of systemic change that matters. It addresses the root cause. It treats prevention as seriously as punishment. It says that young people deserve the truth about love, abuse, and consent, even if it’s awkward, even if it’s uncomfortable, even if it makes adults squirm in their seats. Because the alternative is far more uncomfortable: more girls whose futures are stolen, more families attending funerals, more young men learning that violence is what relationships look like. Education is not the only answer, but without it, nothing else can work.
Faustine’s abuser was eventually jailed. She went to the police in 2020 and watched as the man who had tried to destroy her was held accountable, at least for a time. She then did something extraordinary: she went on to graduate from King’s College, Cambridge, and is now a PhD student at Warwick. But the scars remain. She says that although she is doing much better, the impacts of the abuse are still there. She struggled socially at university; it was hard to feel safe and at ease. Because he served only a short sentence, and because of the threats he had made in the past, she knew she couldn’t have a normal university experience. Even in her success, the abuse echoes. That is the reality of violence against women and girls: it doesn’t end when the relationship ends. It follows you into lecture halls, into new friendships, into every attempt to reclaim your life. Faustine is one of the lucky ones, in the sense that she survived and found a way forward. But no one should have to be lucky. Everyone should have the education to see abuse coming, the language to name it, and the support to leave before their world is torn apart. This is what the bill offers: a chance to rewrite the ending for the next generation. It won’t be a magic cure, but it is a crucial step. At sixteen, Faustine didn’t know she was being abused. At sixteen, she had no words for the violence she was enduring. At sixteen, her life was derailed by someone she loved. The campaign to make relationships and sex education compulsory until eighteen is a promise that no future sixteen-year-old should have to learn about abuse the way she did. It’s a promise that we will teach our children about love, in all its beauty and danger, before the world teaches them through broken bones and broken hearts. It’s a promise we owe to every young person with a Cambridge dream and an abuser waiting around the corner. Let’s make it mandatory. Let’s do it now.
