[Mb-civic] Abusive relationships amongst teenagers

[Alexander Harper]

Hallo all - I have just returned from Cuba. Interesting. Too complicated to email, hence the hiatus.

I reproduce a letter from my younger daughter, published in The Independent and The Week. After making full allowance for paternal pride, I thought it was worth sending on to you.
quote

Abusive relationships,
22 March 2005
The reason young women tolerate abusive relationships 

Sir: Like many people I was saddened to read about the levels of violent abuse teenage girls suffer at the hands of their boyfriends ("One in five girls hit by boyfriend", 21 March) but perhaps unlike other readers I was not surprised.

Most of the media attention has focused on the correlation between girls who witness or suffer abuse at home and go on to suffer abuse from boyfriends. While this obviously needs to be addressed, I am surprised that nobody has focused on the more startling fact that the majority of teenage girls who accept being hit by their partners (over two thirds) have never had experience of abuse before.

As a young woman in my early twenties I have been concerned since my teenage years by my peer group's distressing lack of self-esteem. On all sides in film, commercials and magazines we are fed the message that finding and keeping a man is the ultimate goal and the ultimate status of cool. You cannot open a girls' or women's magazine without finding myriad surveys on what clothes men find attractive, how to get a date, what sex tips to use etc. The implied message is that to take part in mainstream culture you have to have a man.

The result is that girls find their self-image depends on sexual relationships and they become increasingly prepared to take a man at any price, violence being the extreme end of the scale. I cannot name one girl of my acquaintance (myself included) who has not at some point put up with bullying behaviour or given into sexual demands they secretly didn't want rather than lose a man. Sometimes this is not even a case of girls acting on misguided love but because they believe this is what they should be doing. As one friend who was sexually coerced told me, "Maybe I'm just uptight; isn't this what everyone else is doing?"

Until we address the way our culture presents sex and relationships to young girls, I'm afraid we will continue to see figures like these.

ELODIE HARPER 
London NW3

unquote

Al Baraka


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