The simple fact is there’s never any growth without growing pains. Adolescence is always an uncomfortable journey from innocence to experience, a time of transition and turmoil and, on occasion, genuine crisis.

Ultimately what has been called “the springtime of life” is a proving ground, one that battle-hardens us when we are at our most vulnerable and unseasoned for the trials and rigours that lie ahead.

Stupid indiscretions and everyday acts of rebellion are, of course, as much rites of passage for Bermuda’s young people as getting our moped licence or writing off our parents’ generation as the most terminally unhip and uninformed one ever to walk the Earth.

Experience, it’s been said, is the name we all give to our mistakes. And certainly adolescence is a time when mistakes are plentiful and more valuable lessons are learnt, albeit usually belatedly, than at any other period in our lives.

There’s a reason adults look back on these years with a mixture of nostalgia, amusement and, in our most private moments, cringe-inducing horror as we recall the missteps and general messiness of our passages to adulthood.

The close calls and near-disasters of our youth can be sufficient to send shivers racing down the vertebrae even decades later. But the reality is even our most ill-judged youthful follies were known only ever to a relatively small circle of family, friends and acquaintances and, on occasion, authority figures.

Mercifully, they eventually tend to be forgotten — by all except ourselves.

At least that’s the way it used to be.

In the pre-internet era, private transgressions only rarely became public property or public talking points. And they never became public spectacles, uploaded to “the cloud” where they can be endlessly shared, reread or replayed.

We now live in an age when social media spreads gossip faster and more efficiently than even the most disapproving scold’s tongue. And almost everyone carries a powerful video camera in their pocket in the form of a smartphone. So it’s all too easy for every young person’s every life experience to become part of their permanent record.

“Do young people — #teens, as it were — still enjoy the same freedom to make mistakes and get things wrong and get, in the most productive sense, hurt?” Megan Garber, a cultural correspondent for The Atlantic magazine, asked recently.

The answer to that rhetorical question is clearly “no” and she went on to explain why.

“Digital platforms have a way of transforming youthful mistakes into permanent media,” Ms Garber said. “It has sexting and revenge porn and Facebook and spyware and an internet that, for better and sometimes for worse, refuses to forget.”

A momentary lapse in judgment, a bad choice in friend or romantic partner, a single act of recklessness of the kind we are all guilty of having made, can now have the most profound and far-reaching consequences.

Even the most embarrassing or painful or intimate one-off experience can no longer just be considered a fleeting youthful misstep, one hopefully to be learnt from. They can all take on an eternal digital afterlife.

A number of sex clips featuring Bermuda teens, some thought to be of the “revenge porn” variety, underscores this fact in the bleakest possible way. However, there are dozens of other less sensational examples of the public pillorying of young people popping up on the internet every day. And all too often, it is the mistakes of those teens who are already the most vulnerable and least able to protect themselves that gain the most traction and the most number of views.

In the cyberage, bullying is no longer confined to the schoolyard or the locker room. The reality is Bermuda teens are being taunted and shamed online on an increasingly routine basis.

Gossip and bullying have, of course, always thrived in school environments, as have social hierarchies that delight in dropping the black ball of social exclusion on those they deem to be untouchables.

There will always be youngsters with a diabolical knack for sowing discord, for passing along cruel gossip or idle rumours. The internet is simply the latest and most powerful weapon in the arsenal of those who take unvarnished pleasure in stereotyping and scapegoating.

But the petty cruelties of a victimised teen’s peers now have a reach that extends far beyond the grounds of a middle school or secondary school. And such online abuse has the potential to inflict life-altering harm.

To their credit, Bermuda’s school principals and guidance counsellors are seeking ways to monitor and combat online harassment involving their students. Parents are increasingly familiarising themselves with a sometimes strange new social-networking environment, which their children grew up with and can navigate effortlessly.

And social-media sites are doing better jobs of policing themselves; they are able to track the escalation of attacks on an individual and to trace such damaging outbreaks back to their original sources (if you actually complain to Facebook about being harassed or bullied, the site now acts speedily. “If the content is about you, and you’re just a schoolkid and not a famous public figure, we don’t sit around debating the finer points of freedom of speech,” a spokesman has said. “If it’s mean, we just take it down.”)

Such steps are welcome. Online abuse will never, of course, be entirely eliminated, but it can be far better controlled than has been the case until recently. There are already enough growing pains associated with adolescence without the addition of a sometimes hugely damaging new one like cyberbullying.