Year 10 girls most likely to vape at high schools
ONE in five 14- and 15-year-old girls admit to vaping regularly and more than half have experimented with vapes.
The latest Young People’s Survey showed that Year 10 girls were twice as likely to vape as other secondary school students.
A local teenager who spoke to the Guernsey Press said she started experimenting with vaping when she was 14. She expected that the actual number of Year 10 girls regularly vaping was likely to be higher than indicated by the survey.
‘When I started vaping, they were actually quite hard to get hold of, but now they are everywhere.
'Everyone knows the shops that sell vapes without asking for ID,’ she said.
She was attracted to e-cigarettes by a particular brand which she saw online.
‘It was a trend at the time. All the fashion bloggers had them and a lot of my peer group started using them,’ she said.
A report from the UK anti-smoking group Ash (Action on Smoking and Health) found that almost half of teenagers had seen adverts for vapes on the social media app TikTok and that disposables had become the most popular vapes for the first time, up from less than 8% in 2021 to 52% last year.
The teenager said she started vaping regularly at the age of 16. She started buying vapes on mail order from US websites. They were stronger than those legally sold in the UK.
‘Lots of my friends got them that way. After vaping for a bit you wanted something stronger,’ she said.
She stopped vaping a month ago after becoming increasingly concerned about the impact it was having on her health.
A younger high school student told the Guernsey Press that the prevalence of vaping at his school was making it difficult to use the toilets.
‘I’m aware of older students regularly vaping at school. They use the toilets and it affects me, as I won’t go into the toilets at those times and then teachers are reluctant to let us go to the toilet during lessons,’ he said.
The boy said that so far he had not been offered a vape or tempted to use one.
‘I wouldn’t be tempted as it ruins your lungs.
‘It’s mainly the older students who vape, but there are some in Year 7 who do it as well.
'I don’t know how they get hold of them,’ he said.
