Sunday, October 11, 2009
News, In this Issue...

When love hurts

Emory wins grant to fight teen dating violence, Atlanta college campuses hit by problem, too

Shutterstock.com./Dodorema

By Muriel Y. Vega and Stephanie Ramage

One in six Georgia high school students has been abused by a boyfriend or girlfriend, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That’s nearly twice the national average for teenage dating violence.

In recognition of the significance of the problem, the Jane Fonda Center at Emory University recently won a $1 million grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to fight abuse in relationships among young people. The center is one of only 11 community organizations to receive funding through the foundation’s Start Strong: Building Healthy Teen Relationships Program. This is the largest national public health initiative ever funded, targeting dating violence among 11-to-14-year-olds.

“There are no boundaries to where this issue can go. Teen dating violence and abuse is a significant public health issue in this country,” Jane Fonda told an Emory University audience on Sept. 30, during an event marking the launch of Start Strong Atlanta. “In a 2009 CDC study, researchers found that nearly half of 6th grade students, 42.1 percent, who reported being in a relationship, also reported experiencing physical dating violence for the past three months.”

Fonda, who is founder and CEO of the Georgia Campaign for Adolescent Pregnancy Prevention, believes abuse in teen relationships should be seen as a sort of epidemic, since it occurs at increasingly younger ages.

“Besides doing physical harm and even causing death, teen dating violence and abuse is associated with higher rates of drug and alcohol abuse, unplanned pregnancy, STDs, depression, and suicidal tendencies,” says Fonda. “This is a problem that impacts more than 1 million young people each year, crossing all race and socioeconomic boundaries, perpetuating an intergenerational cycle of violence and abuse.”

Also alarming is the grade given to Georgia by BreakTheCycle.org, an organization that empowers youth to end domestic violence. The grade is decided based on whether state laws help or impede younger victims’ access to domestic violence protection orders.

BreakTheCycle gave Georgia an F. Other flunkers were Alabama, Arizona, Kentucky, Missouri, North Carolina, Ohio, South Carolina, South Dakota, Utah and Virginia. States that snagged A’s were New Hampshire, California, Illinois, Minnesota and Oklahoma.

Taylor Thompson Tabb, fatality review project coordinator for the Georgia Coalition Against Domestic Violence, says according to Georgia’s law, people under the age of 18 usually are not eligible for a protective order. The state’s domestic violence law recognizes a “relationship” as being one characterized by living together or having a child together. In 2008, she says, 111 deaths in Georgia resulted from intimate partner violence, including married spouses as well as unmarried partners.

“That number also includes perpetrators who committed suicide,” she says.

CLARKSTON TEENAGER’S DEATH INSPIRED LEGISLATION

State Sen. Gloria Butler (D-Stone Mountain) is aware of Georgia’s low rating. She sponsored legislation earlier this year called the "Brittany Sharnay Wells Act.” The measure was named for a 17-year-old Clarkston girl who was choked to death in January by her 17-year-old boyfriend.

One major component of the legislation, which was referred to the Senate education committee at the end of the session, is teaching young people how to recognize healthy, respectful relationships as part of the high school health curriculum. Although it doesn’t directly address the matter of protection orders, its intention is to help teens avoid the kind of relationship that would require such an order.

Butler says she knows that some Georgians might feel that kids should be taught by their parents how to recognize a good relationship, but the fact is that many won’t learn that from their parents.

“In many homes, the parents don’t treat each other right, so when their son begins dating he thinks that’s the way to treat a girl,” says Butler, adding that the cost of abusive relationships is eventually born by taxpayers through fallout from the abuse itself or divorce, unplanned pregnancies, and other problems.

Her bill was co-sponsored by five other state Senators, Nan Orrock (D-Atlanta), Valencia Seay (D-Riverdale), Emmanuel Jones (D-Decatur), Gail Buckner (D-Jonesboro) and Kasim Reed (D-Atlanta) who has since left the Senate to run for mayor of Atlanta.

“Unfortunately violence is all too common among people in romantic relationships, and is a risk our teens need to be aware of and take steps to protect against, like other issues,” says Reed. “Domestic violence isn't limited to married couples, and we need to be equipping our teens with the tools to recognize and respond appropriately to abusive relationships.”

Butler says she plans to resurrect the bill in the next legislative session.

At the Feminist Women’s Health Center in Atlanta, Executive Director Nancy Boothe says she is seeing something new.

“I don’t know if I would go so far as to say it is an epidemic, but we are definitely seeing more of this behavior,” says Boothe. She explains that young women typically come to the center when they need medical services for sexually transmitted diseases or pregnancy. Often, she says, the young women have become infected or pregnant through violent coercion. Today, she says, technology has exacerbated an existing problem. Boyfriends can silence girls they’ve abused by threatening them with blackmail through sending out intimate photos via cell phone or blast e-mails. 

Nearly one in 10 American high school students have been hit, slapped or intentionally physically hurt by a boyfriend or girlfriend according to the CDC’s National Youth Risk Behavior survey conducted in 2006. 

Elizabeth Cardenas, a Start Strong Atlanta youth leader, watched a friend stay in a violent relationship, unable to help her, for nearly two years, because of her own young age and lack of resources. The 17-year-old says this experience was one of the most difficult of her life.

“She didn’t know how to get out and I didn’t know how to help her,” Cardenas said during the Sept. 30 Emory event. 

According to a study conducted by Teenage Research Unlimited for the Family Violence Prevention Fund (FVPF) and Liz Claiborne Inc., released last spring, nearly one in three teens reports “threats of violence, or sexual or physical abuse. Nearly one in four reports being victimized through technology, and nearly one in two who are in relationships report being controlled, threatened, and pressured to do things they did not want to do.”

DATING VIOLENCE ON COLLEGE CAMPUSES

Women between the ages of 16 and 24 experience the highest rate of intimate partner violence, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics. Students often cannot recognize verbal and emotional abuse, or do not have enough experience to know that a certain kind of behavior is not normal or healthy.

How prevalent dating violence is, how many teens and college students stay in abusive relationships and for how long, is hard to know. Sarah Cook, a professor of psychology at Georgia State University who has researched abusive relationships, says the number we do know may hint at an even a larger number. There is still a subtle strain of sexism even on college campuses, she says, and women are so often blamed for the abuse they endure, they can be reluctant to speak up about it.

Cook recalls a student who missed class a few times. Cook called her to find out what was going on.

“She said ‘I look terrible,’” says Cook. “Her boyfriend had beaten her up.”

Research among college women shows that if reports of dating violence involving drugs or alcohol are removed from the statistics, about 20 percent of women in college have been victims of abuse at the hands of an intimate partner.

“If you add those [the drug and alcohol numbers] back in, you get the one-in-four statistic that most people are familiar with,” Cook says. But the numbers get fuzzier when one considers the various names used to describe dating violence, she says: Teen dating violence, intimate partner violence (IPV), domestic violence, child abuse, child sexual abuse, etc. Researchers working in one area may not even be aware of the numbers turning up in another area that overlaps with their own. When they do look into each other’s fields, she says, new things come to light.

For example, some researchers now claim that boys who are bullies often grow up to abuse women. The reasoning, says Cook, is that as they grow up they can’t get away with picking on other males anymore, so they look for a more vulnerable target and find it in girls.

Larry Gourdine, who heads the University of Georgia’s Office of Violence Prevention, says students are more likely to experience emotional, verbal and psychological abuse than physical abuse in relationships.

“Just like sexual violence, intimate partner violence is also very underreported. This makes it difficult to provide a precise number as to what is actually happening on college campuses,” he says via e-mail. 

Gourdine says victims are reluctant to report abuse because they are ashamed, blame themselves, don't want to get the abuser in trouble, think that no one will believe them, think that no one can or will help, or because there is a co-dependence between the abuser and the abused.

An hour south of Atlanta, in Milledgeville, Georgia College and State University’s Women’s Center offers anything from practical advice to legal resources. Jennifer Graham Stephens, coordinator, and one of the founders of the women’s center, says that it includes a safe house for students in abusive relationships.

“We would talk to [the student] to make sure what’s going on, introduce her to safety planning to make sure she has some good strategies to stay safe,” says Graham Stephens. “Get her in touch with some local resources and some Atlanta resources, if she is from Atlanta, shelters, and legal resources if she wanted to get a protective order. We try to really equip students as much as we can.”

She says that being aware of the power balance of your relationship is necessary for it to stay healthy.

“It’s important to know that a healthy relationship is a partnership and decisions are made jointly, responsibilities are shared, respect and trust should be given to each other,” Graham Stephens says. “Sometimes, it might not be that it is an abusive relationship, but it might be an unhealthy relationship. Communicate and think critically about your relationship.” SP