Most kids are terrifying. But there is a particular brand of evil which I believe is found exclusively in children under the age of seven. Since the 1990s, educators have, with good reasons, taken more and more seriously the need to cultivate empathy in children, helping them to understand the feelings and perspectives of others.

I remember the plethora of kids’ TV shows I watched featuring the explanation that the big scary bully was really just sad and a little bit lonely. If it was based on a Jacqueline Wilson novel, his parents had probably split up too. I remember something very vague and intangible about ‘other people have feelings too’ being the central – if not only – component of the PSHE education I received up until the age of 16. And I’ve come to see this vagueness as a big problem.

I was about 17 years old before I realised that, if someone hurt me, my being hurt was justified – and that quite possibly what they’d done was just flat-out wrong. I do know some kids who still don’t really understand the capacity their actions have to hurt other people – these children are somehow now in their 50s and still show no signs of maturing.

But there are also some kids, like me, who actually had maybe a bit too much empathy, and needed to be told their feelings were just as important as everybody else’s. Refer to my mother for early stories of my sensitivity: when Billie Piper and David Tennant got split up on Doctor Who I barely stopped crying for two whole days.

If you’re a kid already hyper-conscious about other people’s feelings, and desperate to be a good person, you end up hearing these messages and internalising them in a pretty screwed up way.

When you’re taught that everyone deserves a second chance, that there is always a reasonable explanation for people systematically lying to you, constantly invading your personal space or gluing your pencil case shut (shout-out to my primary school bully), your reaction always becomes invalid.

If this issue never went beyond the tragic fate of my gel pens, entombed for evermore, I probably wouldn’t be writing a column about it. The issue presents itself when this whole ‘keep having faith in humanity’ narrative begins to take its toll on your physical and emotional safety.

As I went through school, I gradually learned that just because someone was going through a hard time, it didn’t mean that I had to be their figurative emotional punch-bag, but that took a lot of learning.

I would endlessly accommodate people’s shit behaviour and discard how completely one-sided these friendships ended up being until I was effectively no longer a friend but a carer, a role I was always completely out of my depth in handling. By the time I left school I figured I’d sussed it out – I’d realised that an explanation wasn’t always necessarily a justification.

But in my first year at Cambridge, in these hallowed, enlightened corridors of knowledge, one of the greatest things I learned was not an understanding of the social stratification of the early Ottoman Empire, but the unfathomably shitty behaviour people could sink to. And the blind faith I had that everyone I met was essentially harmless certainly didn’t help to keep me protected.

Something I like to call ‘the Snape Effect’ occurs when someone’s tragic backstory is an automatic excuse for whatever behaviour they might choose to enact, because no one else will ever override their victimhood.

Don’t get me wrong, empathy is more than a virtue – it’s indispensable. But so is expecting that people will take responsibility for their actions. Alongside your circumstances, and beneath your mental illness or your parents’ divorce, is your character. And that character resides within the choices you make.