Seventeen-year-old Sewa Olukoga was recently on a school trip in Portsmouth when she noticed she was being followed. “It was me and one other black girl in the class. We were in the shopping centre, and the security guard was watching us, suspiciously. It always happens. He was following us around the store.”



According to Olukaga, “It’s not that we’re loud, we just have a presence. We’re always being told to dial it down a little bit.”

Anecdotally, her experience and those of other young black women who have grown up in Britain appear to correlate with the latest studies in the US. A new book, Pushout: the Criminalization of Black Girls in Schools by Monique Morris, highlights the disproportionate levels of punishment meted out to black schoolgirls, who make up 16% of female students but more than one-third of all girls with a school-related arrest.

I always got straight As ... yet my teachers perceived anything I did as being really aggressive, really angry Yewande Adeniran

The reasons are complex, but may be linked to recent research by Georgetown Law’s Center on Poverty and Inequality, which found that adults view black girls as “less innocent” and “more adult-like” than their white peers.

The Georgetown academics surveyed adults from diverse backgrounds and drew a range of conclusions, including that adults think black girls, especially between the ages of five and 14, need less protection than white girls, know more about sex and need less nurturing than white girls. This mirrors previous research in the US which has found that, from age 10 onwards, black boys are more likely to be viewed as older and guilty of suspected crimes than their white peers.

Yewande Adeniran, 23, had a particularly tough childhood thanks to her skin colour, and believes the Georgetown study reflects her experiences. She was the only black girl at her boarding school apart from her sister, and says she was immediately singled out:

“I’d get put into detention for things my white female peers didn’t. We’d just be in class chatting – and I always got straight As, so it wasn’t like I was being bad – but I’d be sent to isolation. I had a teacher who picked all of the people of colour out, and the only outwardly gay person too. He moved me down a set and said, ‘We don’t want too many of your kind of people in the top set.’”



It may sound like the stuff of 1950s racist nightmares, but this was in the 2000s. Perhaps Adeniran’s treatment forced adulthood upon her faster than it should have come, the perception of a lack of innocence becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy?



“They perceived anything I did as being really aggressive, really angry. Even me calling something out as racist [would equal] isolation,” she says. “I was 15, none of the teachers listened to me, the head of the year pulled me into a class and started calling me a bitch and all sorts of stuff. I told the head of school, but obviously nothing was done.”

Much like in the US, a lot of black British girls tend to do well at school. As far back as 2004, black African girls were overtaking white British boys in the classroom. But black African students also significantly outperform their Caribbean counterparts, and black Caribbean girls are twice as likely to be excluded from school than other female students. This reflects the statistics from the US, where researchers worry the perception of black girls lacking innocence is leading to their higher rates of exclusion and suspension.



As a mixed-race black child myself, growing up in a very white environment in Scotland, I didn’t ever come close to being excluded from school – but there were incidents that still rankle. As one of only two black girls in my year, I was picked on at various points by teachers; in my final year, a teacher told me just because I was black, that didn’t mean I could get away with giving him dirty looks.

My black peers in their early 20s have dozens of horror stories to tell: “I used to get detentions for the way I’d walked into lessons ... Teachers used to tell other pupils confidential private stuff I’d told them; put me on report card and threatened to take away my scholarship when they found out I was self-harming.”

Some say they felt sexualised by adults from an early age. One friend recalls that “adults used to comment on my body bare when I was in primary school, and note how it was developing, in a way that they would never do to white girls”.

‘Watch what you wear’

So is the situation any different for young girls now? Ella Benson Roberts is a biracial white and black Caribbean student at Acland Burghley school in north-west London. We meet at Caravan in Kings Cross for a hot chocolate and fries with her mum.

“I really enjoy sociology and drama; I feel sociology looks into different people’s lives and how things affect them differently,” the 14-year-old tells me. “And you’re a bit of a feminist, aren’t you?” chimes in her mum. “Yeah,” Ella says, “an intersectional feminist. Or a womanist.”



‘Intersectional feminist’ Ella Benson Roberts

Thanks to the internet, black girls these days have the language to explain their struggle. Recent research from the media agency UM London suggests that 69% of teenage girls in the UK now identify as feminists: a higher proportion than any other age group. When Ella tells me about some of her feminist idols, Amandla Stenberg and Yara Shahidi, I feel gladdened these black women I’ve often written about are impacting their peers in a positive way. There was no real equivalent when I was in my teens.



Ella’s complaints are less about how she’s treated by adults, and more how her friends often run their hands through her afro. “I don’t think I’ve been treated that differently,” she says, “But there are certain things that adults do which are annoying – like comment on my hair.” It makes her feel as though she stands out.

The Georgetown study didn’t make allowance for light- and dark-skinned African American children, but my guess is that lighter-skinned and mixed-race children – like myself and Ella – are probably perceived as being slightly more innocent than darker-skinned children, thanks to colourism.



Fifteen-year-old Jade Olaide is of Nigerian heritage, and has had a slightly different experience of growing up black. “I’ve been told I act older than most of my year group; that I come across as more mature than other people my age,” she says. “That happens to a lot of my [black] friends too – being [seen as] more mature than their white counterparts.”



But Jade also says she has been treated as “older” by her family since she was very young. “I’ve been given responsibility at a young age. It wasn’t just in school – I think it’s a cultural thing: I was expected to do more than my white friends. I don’t think it’s a bad thing.”

It may also be the case, of course, that black girls are treated as older by relatives who want to prepare them for the struggles of being a minority in a white world. Jade, a born-and-bred Mancunian, describes a recent incident that made a big impression on her:

“We were kicked out of McDonald’s,” she says of her black friendship group. “It wasn’t actually us that caused the trouble, but the police were called to McDonald’s and every single one of my friends got kicked out. That day really upset and angered me … Something went on with a white group of people, and the police showed up and straight away went to our table without asking any questions.”



Protesters at a #SayHerName vigil held in New York in 2015. Photograph: Tim Knox/The Guardian

Jade has a lot of black friends from similar Nigerian backgrounds, which means she’s always had someone to talk to about her identity issues. She says she is looking forward to visiting Nigeria for the first time in the next year, and sometimes talks as though everyday racism is something that happened to my generation, but not her own.



“My brothers went through racism as well, and because there’s an age gap they grew up quite a long time before me,” Jade says. “Racism was actually quite bad when they were growing up … They repeat to me a lot of the time: ‘You’re a black girl growing up in a white man’s world. You need to keep your head down, and don’t ever let it get to you.’”



Olukoga, who is one of three girl triplets, remembers her older brother often having “the talk” about racism with her father. “It’s something that’s been discussed in my house, but always directed towards my brother – he’s a black guy, he has to be aware,” she says. “With me and my sisters, it was never really explicit. It was more like ‘watch your tone of voice’, that kind of thing. And watch what you wear, because you’re over-sexualised [by adults].”

According to Olukoga, who lives in Islington, north London, “A lot of my friends have quite curvaceous bodies and the cat-calling, the screaming, is very uncomfortable to watch. It’s definitely a problem – we’re only 16 or 17. Our body types shouldn’t give you a passport to advance on us.”



After studying the Civil Rights movement in the US, Olukoga did her own research on the black power movement and her black identity on social media. “You can often get stuck in your own bubble and think there’s not a lot of black women out there doing their thing,” she says. “Up until two years ago I didn’t really think there was anyone out there doing it [being a politician]. The only person I could think of was Diane Abbott. But then I got on Twitter and saw a bunch of amazing black women and it pushes you a lot.”

In the future, Olukoga is considering building a foundation to support black boys. “I see a lot of stuff – how they’re demonised in the media as ‘aggressive’. I want to do something to get away from the stigma of black boys and find a balance.”

But concerns about how young black men are treated by adult authority figures can sometimes leave black women battling their oppressions alone, as Kimberlé Crenshaw, creator of the #SayHerName campaign in the US, identified – pointing out that police violence occurs disproportionately to black women too.

“One of the things that is unique about gender racism in American society,” Crenshaw told Revolution Newspaper, “is that black women are subject to many of the racial stereotypes that people think apply primarily to men. In fact, they apply to women as well.”