How bad is sexual bullying in schools?

I'll admit to a natural suspicion of claims that everything's got much worse since the good old days. It's not that they're never true; but we're worryingly good at seeing the past through rose-tinted spectacles.

So I wasn't sure what to make of tonight's Panorama, on the apparent growth in sexual bullying in schools.

To summarise the programme, sexual bullying is now commonplace in our secondary schools, ranging from calling someone gay or slut through groping to full sexual assault and even rape. Even primary schools are seeing inappropriate behaviour. Parents are concerned and the Internet and TV were wheeled out as suspects.

I'm the last person to downplay bullying. Some of the stories in the show sounded terrible and I've no doubt that some of the victims will take years to recover and some of the bullies will look back in a decade and be thoroughly ashamed of what they did.

But I do have to question the idea that it's much worse now than in the past.

I want to be clear about this: I'm not saying that it definitely isn't worse now. I don't have the evidence to support that. I'm saying that I didn't see much evidence in the programme to show that things are more terrible these days, so I wonder if it really is, or whether it's just the easy kids now are much worse behaved than when I were a lad that pretty much every generation has believed since at least the Ancient Greeks.

Here's my experience in childhood. It's pure anecdote, so proves nothing, but I've never had the impression it was particularly unusual.

I was bullied for a couple of years of my school life. Not especially badly, but enough to make me feel sick at the thought of going to school every morning and fake illness to avoid it on occasion. My friend was less lucky and ended up in a psychiatric hospital. In my day, I always had the impression that teachers tolerated a certain level of bullying in a way that isn't the case so much today. As a teenager, I briefly had a job minding a nine-year-old boy accused of raping a girl in his school.

I don't think bullying has got worse (if anything, probably the opposite), but Panorama was about sexual bullying in particular. On that particular subject, my anecdotes run dry as it wasn't something that affected me personally at school.

But I do take issue with the idea that our childhood used to be an idyllic asexual garden. As Freud noted over a century ago (and he may not have got much right, but he was spot on with this one), children have always been sexual beings.

In Panorama, concern was expressed at eight-year-old girls wanting to try wearing make-up and twelve year olds reading magazines with boyfriend advice. And? We may not have had the Internet or decent sex education in my day, but anyone who thinks sexuality was something we all discovered at the age of sixteen should really examine their memory.

From kiss-chase and knicker-chase at primary school, to lads having a look through their first porn mag to who-knows-what-else since it wasn't the sort of thing you'd tell people about.

Maybe there really was a lot less sexual banter, inappropriate touching and sexual assault at secondary school in past decades than today - I really can't say. But's it's going to take a bit more than "it wasn't like this in my day" when, in many ways, it very obviously was, to convince me.