Dangerous liaisons

Can a program pioneered by young women who were victims of dating violence teach teens to end the abuse?

By Lynn Harris

Read more: Life

March 21, 2006 | It's a warm March evening at a youth center in northern New Jersey. Ten minutes ago, about 15 teenage girls, black, white and Latina, almost all in jeans, were playing some boisterous, scrappy billiards or practicing hip-hop moves. Now they're sprawled on couches listening quietly to a presentation -- until some of them are suddenly told to get up.

"Can you go in the corner and stand under the basketball hoop?" one of the two presentation leaders asks a girl. "Can you come here and do jumping jacks?" she asks another, without smiling. "I'll tell you when to stop." And another: "Can you come forward here and sing 'Happy Birthday'?" Guffaws, protests. The leader relents, but only slightly. "OK, you can just say it if you want." The game continues, like some sort of extreme Simon Says. "You in the white jacket, can you go walk around the room?" Girls are walking, singing, jumping all around, their faces reddening while their friends snicker on the couch. Finally, they're told to sit down.

"How did you guys feel when I made you do what I do?" the leader asks. The chorus: "Embarrassed." "You were controlling." "I felt like you had no respect." "If you're gonna ask me to do something, at least do it with courtesy!"

"Then why did you do it?"

Because, they say, they felt like they had to. Like they'd get in trouble if they didn't.

"The reason why we do this game," says the leader, 20-year-old Chinonye ("Chin-EYE-ah") Chukunta, "is to show you how a victim feels inside an abusive relationship."

Chinonye and her presentation partner, Shaina Weisbrot, 19, are two of the co-founders of TEAR: Teens Experiencing Abusive Relationships. They're well aware that, if statistics are any indication, one in five of those girls already knows exactly how a victim feels, that one in three is either in a violent relationship or knows someone who is, and that girls between 16 and 24 are more likely than any other age group to experience relationship abuse. Chinonye, Shaina and their three partners -- who also juggle college classes and paid jobs -- travel to New Jersey schools and community groups presenting workshops on dating violence awareness and prevention, up to three times a week. What makes 3-year-old TEAR unique is this: Its presenters speak directly from experience. All friends since junior high, each TEAR member has been through at least one abusive relationship -- except Chinonye, who has become an expert on helping a friend who's being abused.

Organizations like TEAR, founded and run exclusively by teens, appear to be rare. But TEAR -- and its success -- are part of an explosion of dating violence resources that has, for good reasons and sad, taken place over the last 10 years.

In 1996, by way of comparison, it took some doing for me to convince the editors of Parade magazine that "dating violence" existed in the first place. At the time, I could offer only scattered, tiny-scale statistics, a few examples of community efforts and school programs -- and a pile of newspaper clippings about teen girls murdered by their boyfriends. But my story finally ran on the cover; over the two weeks that followed, the volume of calls to the National Domestic Violence Hotline doubled. It existed, all right.

Today, teens have far more resources not only for support, but also for prevention. There are now hundreds of dating-violence awareness programs in communities and schools, many with teen workshop presenters. The National Center for Victims of Crime offers a Dating Violence Resource Center. Sen. Mike Crapo, R-Idaho, declared Feb. 6-10 of this year National Teen Dating Violence Awareness and Prevention Week, calling on government and private groups to sponsor educational activities. The response was more than ceremonial: The American Bar Association, for one, worked with teens to create a dating violence "toolkit" available to schools -- including safety tips, key phone numbers, a DVD of teens talking about their experiences, and curriculum ideas for teachers.

Awareness of dating violence has increased, in part, as educators have educated themselves, says Patti Giggans, executive director of the Los Angeles Commission on Assaults Against Women (LACAAW) and a pioneer in the field. In the late 1980s, Giggans says, her organization was focused on early intervention: educating teens about healthy relationships in order to prevent domestic violence down the road. "We'd go into schools and talk to students about not growing up to be battered and batterers, but then they'd come talk to us in the hallway and say things like, 'He makes me go home and call him every night at 7 -- is that a 'controlling behavior' kind of thing?'" she says. "That's how it dawned on us: We were talking about the future, but it was happening now."

Even the term "dating violence" itself has had to come into its own, like "date rape." (Giggans believes it was popularized by her past collaborator and fellow pioneer Barrie Levy, author of several books on the topic, including "Dating Violence: Young Women in Danger.") It was once just as revolutionary to assert that a "date" could "rape" you as it was to assert that obsessive teens were engaged in anything but puppy love.

It's also become clear to educators and advocates that while girls are still the victims in a majority of cases, they can be perps, too. (Guys are even less likely than girls to report abuse, so the numbers of male victims may be higher than anyone realizes.) Dating violence in same-sex relationships also seems to be about as prevalent as it is in straight relationships.

Yet despite the "proliferation" of resources that Giggans has seen in recent years, there's still a long way to go, she says. Some schools still decline LACAAW's violence-prevention curriculum -- in use by thousands of schools and youth programs nationwide and abroad -- saying, "We don't have that problem here." School leadership, system-wide, remains slow to repond to their efforts. Many states still make it difficult for people in dating relationships to secure orders of protection. And, of course, the problem persists: Shaina says that virtually no TEAR presentation ends without someone approaching, or at least e-mailing, to share her, or his, situation.

Next page: "I did something stupid," one girl whispers. "I took him back"