Have you ever discussed teen dating violence?

Would you be surprised if your teen daughter was involved in an incident of dating violence, and she didn’t tell you about it? I would have been, and I suspect you would be too.

Unfortunately, according to this article by Kate Rogers on Thompson
Reuters Foundation News, a majority of teens fail to tell their parents.

A study in 2017 by the National Institute of Justice, a U.S. government research agency, found more than two thirds of teens said they had been in a violent intimate relationship in the previous year.

“There’s something so taboo about the topic,” said Bersheva Delgado, a community liaison at The Healing Center, a New York non-profit group that works with abuse survivors.

The unfortunate reality is that teen girls are too embarrassed to discuss it with their parents, and schools are seemingly reluctant to discuss violent relationships in the classroom.

This research comes from studying 2,000 U.S. homicides, where more than 25% of girls died at the hands of their intimate partner. Two-thirds were killed by guns. The majority were 17 or 18 years old and were dating someone four years their senior.

“When they are experiencing things they recognize as unhealthy, they’re not likely to disclose to adults in their lives,” said lead author Avanti Adhia, a senior fellow at the University of Washington’s medical school.

“By the time kids get to college, it’s too late to start teaching about this,” she told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

For more information,
read the entire report here.

Image by REUTERS/Mike
Blake

Originally published at Stop Human Trafficking Website.