Image: with thanks to freeimages.com, Simon Stratford

It’s been a hard week for 12 year-old Junior MasterChef contestant Valentina Shulz from Brazil.

Whilst she’s been focusing on trying to win her country’s edition of the internationally successful TV cookery competition, others have been judging her in decidedly less savoury ways.

Social media has always embraced such reality shows and this one is no different.

But when suggestive tweets about the pre-teen contestant appeared, containing the show’s hashtag, it was a recipe for disaster.

‘Does anyone know the Twitter of Valentina? She will date me, if she wants it or not,‘ wrote one.

‘If she wants it, it’s not paedophillia, it’s LOVE!‘ tweeted another.

Such remarks enraged Brazilian feminist group ‘Think Olga’ who encouraged women to tweet about their own experiences of being sexually harassed as young girls, both in protest and as a show of solidarity.

Before they knew it, they were trending on Twitter as #Primeiroassedio, or #FirstHarassment, as it’s now become known internationally.

So LMM News went out into South East London to gauge the temperature of public feeling.

Here’s what you told us.

Every woman we spoke to had an early harassment experience to share.

This supports the latest You Gov survey, conducted in 2012 for the End Violence Against Women Coalition.

The survey found that 43% of London women aged between 18 and 34 had experienced sexual harassment in public – over the previous year.

LMM News spoke to Paul Gordon, a London psychotherapist who’s specialised in working with young adults and adolescents, about the effect such harassment can have on women, especially at such a young age.

This item first featured on LMM News Radio’s “Lunchtime Wrap”.