By then, I was still a preteen and had been caught kissing a boy six years my senior — after he persistently followed me home from the bus on a daily basis. I was a straight-A student, but I frequented in-school suspension for being disruptive. Adults had begun to separate me from my peer group — other girls who were less developed — and I was expected to be more mature than everyone else, even though we were all the same age. ( Researchers have since found that Black girls are subject to harsher and more frequent discipline, and they are six times more likely to be suspended, than their white peers.) When adult men directed sexual comments at me, or even physically assaulted me, I was chastised for “leading them on” and told that my shorts were too short. By the time I was 12, my innocence was completely stripped.