“But he said that’s how boys show their love” was the response a young teen gave me when I asked her why she stood passively when her boyfriend started hitting her. While walking the 14-year-old girl to the school nurse’s office after I helped pull them apart, I asked who “he” was. ”My dad,” she answered. She later told me of the years of abuse (my word, not hers) she had received at the hands of her father and that she didn’t think it was true love until she had been hit.
After spending many years working with both girls and boys ages 12 to 18, I found it common to learn that the victims of “boyfriend abuse” had actually been abused at an earlier age by an adult male, most often a family member or family friend. On the extreme end, one girl told of having been sexually molested by her father and brothers and didn’t see anything wrong with it. She told me she expected any new boyfriend to act this way, since it meant “they loved me.”
The stories I listened to almost daily had the same theme — the young girl telling the tale had experienced an atrocity of violence. As someone who learned early on to be very thankful for my dad (soon after I started working with these teens, I called up him out of the blue one day and just said thank you), I found the girls I worked with approached the subject with outward nonchalance, bravado, and even acceptance that such abuse was OK since it kept their boyfriends “loving them.” It took years of counseling, of support, of “no, this isn’t the way it should be,” before their self-esteem began to rise enough to gain the inner strength needed to respect themselves.
As you can tell, I am a firm believer that parenting (or lack thereof) is the main contributor in the formation of a girl’s sense of self. It affects how she does or does not allow herself to get into an abusive relationship — or if she does or doesn’t know how to get out of one immediately. Many girls didn’t have the extreme abuse of the stories I told here. However, verbal degradation, neglect, lack of a positive male role model, and insecurity all played key parts in the often turbulent relationships they had with their boyfriends.
While I will never forget the stories of violence I listened to from hundreds of girls over the years, I also know the immense feeling of satisfaction of being able to help many of them stop the cycle — and you can too. February is Teen Dating Violence Prevention and Awareness Month. Check out this site as well as www.breakthecycle.org for tips on what to watch out for with your own teen (or any teen in your life) as well as how you can help with this cause directly.
The more stories are told, the more resources given, the more we collectively can help other women (and men) learn that what they thought may be “acceptable” isn’t necessarily so. Thank you for sharing yours!
You are so right. I heard a man say once that if a girl doesn’t have her father when she is growing up she will spend the rest of her life looking for him (basically through other solutions/men). I have found this to be true myself. I am so thankful to see this post and site and am anxious to learn more about what break the cycle is doing. Thank you.