9781422276082

Dealingwith Dating and romance

In one study, the American Psychological Association concluded that 1 in 3 teens had experienced some form of abuse in their romantic relationships, whether physical, sexual, verbal, or emotional. Most commonly, males are the perpetrators, but that’s not always the case. Both genders can commit teen dating violence, and both genders can be victims of it. According to the CDC, 11 percent of teenage boys experience some form of abusive behavior. For girls, that number is even higher — one study reported that 25 percent of teenage girls had at some point experienced abusive behavior from someone they were dating. The Youth Behavior Risk Survey, on the other hand, found that 1 out of 8 girls and 1 out of 13 boys had experienced physical violence on a date at some point in the 12 months before the survey was taken. In another survey, 54 percent of high school students reported knowing someone in their peer group who’d been abused. Unfortunately, the news gets worse. More than half of the women who are murdered die at the hands of their partner or ex — and yes, that includes teen girls. On average, 2.5 women and teen girls die at the hands of an intimate partner or ex every single day. In most cases, the killings don’t come out of nowhere; they are the culmination of a long-standing pattern of abusive behavior. More broadly, teen dating violence has been directly connected to a number of mass shootings. The 2018 shootings at Great Mills High School in Lexington Park, Maryland, at Marjory Stoneman Douglas School in Parkland, Florida, and at Santa Fe High School, outside Houston, Texas, can all be connected back to abusive dating behavior on the part of the killers. Ex-girlfriends were primary targets in two of the crimes, while a young woman who had turned down the killer’s advances was a primary target in

14