The turning point came just before school started this year. Whatever sparked his anger that day, the battle raged from living room to bedroom. When he lashed out at her and the baby, she knew she had to leave. Weeks later, as she sat in family court, watching the judge bar him from seeing or speaking to her again, she wasn’t sure. “I was devastated. I wanted to go back to him,” she says. “I just sat there and cried, ‘Am I doing the right thing?’”
Even before they’ve figured out how to deal with sex and romance, a growing number of teenagers find that physical and emotional assault is a dating fact of life. Statistics on teen relationship violence are scarce. In the first study of its kind a decade ago, sociologist James Makepeace of Minnesota’s College of St. Benedict found that 16.8 percent of college students had attacked or been attacked by partners; others estimate that the figure is twice as high. Whatever the number, teen battering reflects more than society’s growing bloodlust. It’s a troubling measure of how adolescents are pressured into adult decisions. just a few generations ago, teenagers didn’t even date. Now kids barely past puberty forge “committed” relationships. For some, the bonds bring marriage-like fulfillment. For others, they can trigger domestic violence–and few teens have the experience to handle it. “They know this feels bad,” says Santa Monica, Calif., therapist Barrie Levy, editor of the book “Dating Violence: Young Women in Danger.” “But it’s easily interpreted as ‘He loves me so much he just wants me to be with him all the time’.”
The reasons girls stay are rooted in adolescence itself, when life is dictated largely by one’s friends. The pressure to date is fierce–and so is the risk of unmasking an abusive boyfriend. If a girl tells her parents, she may lose the social freedom she’s just winning. If she tells her friends, she risks being cut out of the loop. If she tells her teachers, she fears “ruining” a boy’s reputation. Once spurned, he may threaten suicide or vow to kill her. Maybe, she hopes, he’ll change.
Besides, no one gets a black eve on the first date. As with adults, abuse between teens builds slowly, usually after the relationship jells–and then it’s often too late. According to Makepeace, domestic issues–housekeeping, children, finances–tend to set off battering in a marriage, while in dating, fights revolve around sex, drinking and jealousy. Erica, a 16-year-old from suburban Los Angeles, says the violence started with “play” fights. Then one day when they were arguing, she says, her boyfriend slapped her across the face–and didn’t stop the abuse. After that, the relationship roller-coastered from honeymoon to hell. Once, she says, he held a knife to her throat. Even so, she stayed. “I loved him so much he could have had me do anything and I would have done it.”
Although physical abuse is shocking, emotional control is far more common. “Don’t wear your skirt so short–it makes you look fat.” “Don’t kiss me if you’re going to wear lipstick.” Sometimes boys dictate whom their girlfriends see, where they go, what they do. When Carmen met John last year, the New York City 18-year-olds were swept away. After two months, he decided–wrongly, she says–that she had cheated on him on vacation. The emotional pounding became fierce. Now he guards her closely and insists that she bring home a daily class schedule signed by each teacher. Demands like John’s, which are not unusual, alarm counselors. “It’s sending up a sign that this is a very controlling relationship,” says Laura Bretzger of Jersey Battered Women’s Services. “It can grow into a physically abusive relationship.”
Why do boys hit their girlfriends? Like emotional and sexual abuse, violence is a potent means of control that shows up when a boy feels he’s losing control. “It’s planned,” says Allan Shore of California’s Oakland Men’s Project. “If a wife or a girlfriend doesn’t give me something I want, I’m entitled to it.” The attitude is learned. Most batterers–male or female–were hit as children or saw their parents hit; gangs exacerbate the pressure to use force.
Sam used to beat his girlfriend. But the 18-year-old from southern California, who has gang initials tattooed on his left knuckles, insists, “It’s not because you’re in a gang. It’s because you’ve got anger inside.” The first time Sam punched his girlfriend, he says, “I turned off my mind and put in pictures”–of violence at home, of a gang brother smacking his wife at a party. Sam left his girlfriend bloodied. Though he was upset by what he’d done, he picked up a beer and turned away. “When you hit a girl in front of your homeboys, you’ve got to act like a man.”
Parents are confused about what to do. “The reality is, adults are looking at it as just kids’ relationships, puppy love,” says Karen Wilk, coordinator of the Partnerships for Violence programs in Essex County, Mass. Especially if the abuse isn’t physical, many parents don’t know whether to break up the relationship or let it play out. When Jessica began dating the most popular guy in her suburban New Jersey high school, everyone, including her mother, figured it was a coup. That is, until he began calling at all hours, showing up at 2 a.m., threatening to kill himself if she left him. Alarmed, her mother hooked Jessica up with Jersey Battered Women’s Services, then stepped aside. “‘When you see your child tormented like that, it torments you,” says Jessica’s mother. “I wanted to make sure she knew I was there if she needed me. But Jessica is the type who wants to do it on her own.” Erica’s mother was more confrontational. At first, she barred Erica from seeing the boy, then agreed she could date him until graduation. “It’s hard to know what to do. You don’t want to make things worse.”
Although most teenage relationships flourish and wither in school corridors, officials are at a loss to cope with open warfare. Jenny, a 17-year-old New York City high-school senior, boasts that, for years, “people came to school just to see us fight.” No one ever stopped her boyfriend–which, experts say, reveals less about urban education than about cultural conditioning. “Schools are training grounds for domestic violence,” says Nan Stein of the Wellesley College Center for Women. “The girls see grown-ups watching and not intervening. That’s giving girls the message ‘Hey, honey, get used to it,’ and giving boys the message that you get to practice this here.”
Some schools are treating relationship abuse more seriously. Beverly, Mass., High School mounted a dating-violence education program last year after one student, 17-year-old Jamie Fuller. was convicted in the 1991 stabbing death of his 14-year-old girlfriend. Amy Carnevale. “Before Carnevale and Fuller, we knew there were some problems, but we didn’t think it was very widespread,” said principal Keith Manville. Counselor Marvi Haynes of the Women’s Crisis Center in Newburyport saw the problem when she distributed questionnaires in the local high school; of 30 respondents, 17 knew someone in an abusive relationship. “That told me this was a big issue,” says Haynes, who wrote “Hitting Home,” a dating-violence play that’s been seen by 5,000 students.
Intervention is more difficult than prevention. Only eight states allow girls to obtain court orders against a boyfriend, and in only about half those states can girls under 18 apply. By default, schools must resolve the battles with few tools. Carol Sousa, head of the Dating Violence Intervention Project in Cambridge, Mass., says that mediation, typically used in same-sex or gang violence, doesn’t work with couples: “It’s real dangerous for the girl. And it sends a mixed message to the boy”–that it’s a communication problem, when, in fact, the boy has a problem controlling his anger.
When will the violence end? Jenny hopes next month, when she transfers schools for the last few months of her senior year. Jessica hopes it will end in September, when she goes to college–preferably 3,000 miles away. The young New Jersey mother doesn’t know if her fear will ever end, even with the restraining order that keeps her ex-boyfriend away. “I could easily fall back. It’s so easy. If you’re controlled, you have no worries because they always take care of you.” Like many girls in abusive relationships, she realizes that’s not how she wants to live her life.
