When Teen Dating Turns Violent and How to Stop it – Youth Survivors and Activists Share Perspectives
One in three youth in the U.S. experience teen dating violence. The consequences can be long lasting and severe. Schools have sex education classes, but not many teach about how to have healthy relationships, let alone how to set boundaries, and end unhealthy ones. Parents in many cases consider discussing romantic relationships or intimacy taboo.
At a joint briefing by Ethnic Media Services and the California Partnership to End Domestic Violence, supported by a generous Grant from Blue Shield of California Foundation which has taken the lead in supporting work on domestic violence, speakers – Megan Tanahashi, Communications Director, California Partnership to End Domestic Violence; Maya Henry, youth speaker; Ana Campos, youth speaker; Armaan Sharma, youth speaker; and Kandee Lewis, Executive Director, Positive Results Center, Civil and Human Rights Commission, City of Los Angeles – survivors of intimate violence and/or committed to preventing it through educating peers and parents alike. Members of the Partnership’s Youth Advisory Committee, they reflect a growing network of teen activists working on prevention initiatives with local domestic violence programs.
A fourth student, Isha Raheja, wrote a short essay which is published in the box. Isha is a member of youth commission at the California Partnership to End Domestic Violence.
My name is Isha Raheja and I’m a senior in high school. I started working with House of Ruth Women’s Shelter and stopping domestic violence through a personal experience.
People in my life have suffered intimate partner violence and that, obviously along with a concern for the equality and safety of all people, made me want to get involved locally in changing my community and helping others affected by intimate partner violence.
In any social justice movement, its possible outreach efforts are disregarded or disrespected, and my experience has been no different.
The House of Ruth Youth Advisory Committee held an Awareness through Art Showcase against teen dating violence last year.
When I was advertising for the event by posting fliers around my campus, I noticed within a couple days, many of them were missing or ripped. It’s hard to come up with a foolproof method of advocacy that will reach a broad audience and effectively communicate your message.
I lead a sex education club, reformation club at my school (because a healthy and comprehensive sex
ed curriculum can be beneficial in reducing teen dating violence), but it’s no surprise to me that this topic, as well as teen dating violence, can be regarded as taboo by some.
When I first spoke to a student in my class about my club they were taken aback, immediately feeling
uncomfortable and telling me it might not be an appropriate subject for me to address.
The next day, they began to ask me more questions about my club and I discovered this person had been opted out of sex education by their parents and was simply confused about what the subject was and had preconceived biases and notions.
After talking more with them, they agreed to come to a club meeting and ever since then have attended virtually every meeting as an active participant. To turn apathy amongst students to empathy, it wasn’t broadcasting my mission to anonymous people that helped me build a group of like-minded individuals and further progress, but rather speaking on a personal level with individuals. – Isha Raheja
Megan Tanahashi, California Partnership to End Domestic Violence
Megan Tanahashi, Communications Analyst at the California Partnership to End Domestic Violence, talked about the role of young people in addressing teen dating violence mitigation.
“It’s valuable to have youth lead on speaking on this issue because you, today, are able to give an inside peek as to what relationships, both intimate, and with their friends and peers, look like today,” said Tanahashi.
“Social media attention, political climate, and an unprecedented pandemic have created a completely new landscape that teens must navigate today, and it’s completely different from even what I had to navigate 10 years ago.
“Youth are the best messengers, not only to their peers, but they can also easily relate to legislators. These are our two main audiences for teen dating violence awareness and prevention month.
“Prevention is a key aspect of both the awareness month and our work at the partnership.
“At the Partnership, we believe that primary prevention is one of the most effective ways to disrupt the cycle of violence; peer-to-peer prevention efforts can give youth the tools they need to successfully navigate being in a relationship and stop violence from ever occurring in their lives. This is an important message for legislators to hear because our coalition is constantly advocating for some of these programs to have state funding.
“Student mental health rates for youth are an all-time high and new studies also show that young women, in particular, are at a high risk for violence at a young age particularly sexual violence,” said Tanahashi.
Youth Speaker – Ana Campos
Ana Campos, 17, from Orange County, Calif., said, “I got into this work because I am a survivor of the domestic partner violence. I thought it was super important to get help and help other people around me.
“I had been in that relationship with my partner, and it was toxic, and I did not see the red flags. I was blinded by fake love, and I thought what was happening was okay, and it clearly wasn’t,” said, Campos.
“My sister told me: ‘Hey! This is not normal. This is not healthy. This is not okay.’
“Some of the red flags I was constantly ignoring were his manipulation. He would constantly check my phone without my permission, and just be angry over the smallest things, and those are all red flags that I should have seen.
“But I thought, ‘Oh he just cared. He just likes me, and it’s fine.’ But it’s not fine. Those are toxic things that lead to even bigger things,” said Campos.
“I think part of the reason why so much domestic violence happens in teens is because they don’t know what the red flags, or the green flags are, and if it’s not taught at home or if it’s not taught in schools, how are they supposed to know?
“A lot of kids get their information from social media, and social media is as we all know, is not the best place to get information for a lot of things because it romanticizes a lot of abuse,” said Campos.
Youth Speaker – Maya Lucia Henry
“I’m Maya Henry, 16, a junior in high school in Los Angeles said, “I come today as a youth organizer for Peace Over Violence, a prevention and violence recovery center based in Los Angeles.
“When we started to take the bus to and from school, we knew, without even having to confirm with each other, that we are going to pull down our uniform skirts and put on our uniform sweaters when we got on the bus because we didn’t want to have to attract any unwanted attention from grown men. I knew that even as 12-year-old,” said Henry.
“I ride the bus every day. That is a place where I have been sexually assaulted more than once,” said Henry.
“Healing starts with making the conscious effort to not judge yourself or others, and sitting down with someone who may have inflicted violence on someone else and try and find a place to own that violence and apologize and learn and make right their wrong. And then from there, working through restorative justice techniques to make sure that the perpetrator of the violence learns and apologizes and makes good on what they said,” said Henry.
“There are also things that we never even had to be told. We could see stories about girls like us, getting spiked, get date raped, and then we’d go to parties, and we would just implicitly know that it was up to us take steps to prevent that, because there wasn’t a framework for violence prevention in the first place.
“As a queer person, I and my peers are constantly told that it will be a miracle if we find love, and that kind of unhealthy and negative perception thrown into us can only make unhealthy relationships more prevalent.
“You also are potentially dealing with trauma that oftentimes comes with being from a disenfranchised community like the LGBTQ+ community,” said Henry.
Youth Speaker – Armaan Sharma
Armaan Sharma, a high school sophomore at Alsion Montessori Middle/High School, also taking courses at Ohlone College in Fremont, Calif., said, “I’ve grown up in Fremont for my entire life, in an Indian American household with two parents and an older sister. To contextualize, Fremont today is a big suburb, and more than 60 percent of its population is Asian.
“I’m sharing this because this type of diversity has played such an important role in my life. I’ve grown up around people who look like me, share a lot of the same cultural elements, and face some of the same problems at home.
“However, unlike a lot of my peers, my parents have given me and my sister quite a bit of independence that have allowed me to explore the arena.
“Through this work I’ve come to see two major issues for many of my South Asian peers in Fremont, and beyond. The first is that dating is such a taboo in South Asian cultures. Although Indian parents in America are generally much more open to these concepts, dating and intimate relationships are still something that is so sparsely discussed with youth,” said Sharma.
“The lack of dialogue about relationships or dating leads to the lack of dialogue about problems with these relationships or team dating violence. Parents are some of the most important people in youth lives. If parents don’t initiate conversation about dating or relationships, or don’t create a safe space for discussion teams, kids will have to turn to other potentially misleading sources and be will not feel comfortable discussing these topics with parents ever.
“So, youth will suffer, and cycles of violence will continue,” said Sharma.
Talking about diversity, Sharma said, “It’s just something that I want to discuss a little further simply because of how little it’s been discussed previously. Teen dating violence is not something that affects only one group, it can affect everyone including men, and in fact marginalized groups like the LGBTQ+ community often experience much higher rates of such violence, but we’re seeing so little representation in this field and it makes no sense because
Kennedy Lewis, Positive Results Center
“We address trauma revolving around intimate partner violence, sexual assault, and bullying, and I think it’s critical that we really look at the fact that we’re not having the conversations at home. Violence and abuse begin in the womb and when we are not having a lot of conversations at home about healthy relationships, mainly because parents are so concerned that if we talk about healthy relationships we’re giving our children permission to have a relationship. But when we don’t bring up the conversation, children are left to look at their environment and if a family is having an unhealthy relationship, that child will assume that this is normal and so it will go into their relationship most of the time,” said Kennedy Lewis, CEO of Positive Results Center in Los Angeles.
“It’s important that we talk to our children about what a healthy relationship is, or if you’re in an unhealthy relationship, talk to them honestly about that.
“As people we want to be loved. And we want to be accepted. And so, if we’re not getting the kind of attention that we need, we will go and seek that negative attention, because the difference between positive and negative attention, it’s nothing. It’s still attention. And we’re going to get it from wherever we can find it.
“So the conversation should begin at home. What is healthy relationship, what is acceptable behavior, what is unacceptable behavior?
“Social media is showing very unhealthy relationships. They think it’s very cute to expose your body, to even share your body among people, instead of having a relationship with one person. “The music industry is telling you it’s okay to be passed around. And that’s where a lot of abuse begins as well,” said Lewis.
“Parents, learn to have a conversation with your children from a place of love and acceptance as opposed to shame and blame.
“An abusive relationship is about power and control, and you don’t have to be of a certain size, have a certain financial background, ethnicity, or gender, to be the person that is the most empowered or that has the most control, so be aware of that,” said Lewis.
