Young People & Teens
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What Is
Young People & Teen Violence?
Teens and young adults can experience violence in a variety of ways throughout the different intimate and familial relationships they hold. While it is common to focus on romantic relationships, all relationships in their life can be healthy, unhealthy, or abusive and can have a long-lasting impact on their future well-being and relationships.
How are they exposed?
Familial Exposure to Violence:
- Hearing a violent event
- Being directly involved as an eyewitness, intervening, or being used as part of a violent event
- Experiencing the aftermath
- Being used as a source of information
- Being used as a pawn by the harm-doer to coerce the non-offending parent into doing something
- Seeing abusive parent, abuse new partner
- Being denied what is owed for child support or being denied basic daily needs such as food, shelter, medical care, tools for learning
- Threatening violence against the non-offending parent/parental figure, children, and/or pets
- Prolonged court proceedings (especially when the abuser has shown little to no interest previously)
Dating Violence in Teen & Young Adult Relationships:
Adolescence and young adulthood are also a time when many are experiencing sexual or romantic feelings for the first time. As such, it may be the first time they bring an external individual into their inner circles. This means they will experience new views, opinions, and ways of handling stress and conflict. Since these are new, untraveled roads, they might lack the ability to recognize the unhealthiness or abusive behaviors appearing in the relationship.
It is estimated that 1.5 million high school students will experience physical abuse from a dating partner annually, and 1 in 10 have been purposefully hit, slapped physically, or emotionally hurt by their dating partner.
So, what is dating abuse?
Dating abuse is a pattern of coercive, intimidating, or manipulative behaviors used to exert power and control over a partner or partners. The relationship can be severe, causal, between two individuals or open; gay or straight, and of any duration.
While not every unhealthy or abusive relationship will contain the same abusive or coercive behavior, learning more about them can help teens and young adults recognize warning signs in their intimate relationships. These can include:
- Physical abuse- Any intentional or unwanted contact with you or something close to your body intended to cause harm and/or intimidation.
- Emotional and verbal abuse- Any non-physical behavior, e.g., insults, threats (verbal and non-verbal), intimidation, love bombing, isolation, abandonment, making you feel guilty for their actions, causing you to fear for your well-being or safety
- Sexual abuse- Any behavior that pressures or coerces someone to do something sexually that they don’t want to do, including actions that impact a person’s control over their sexual activity.
- Financial abuse- Any behavior that impacts your right to use your money or make decisions tied to your financial well-being (ability to work, how paychecks are utilized)
- Digital abuse- Using any technology and social media platform to bully, harass, stalk, verbally, and/or emotionally abuse a partner.
- Stalking- Being watched, followed, or harassed repeatedly, causing you to feel fear or unsafe.
To learn more, Teen wheel of power and control & Tech wheel of p&c