Dating Abuse Overview

You’re standing at the entrance to an unfamiliar street.  You know that there’s a one-in-five chance (if you’re a girl) [1] or one-in-ten chance (if you’re a boy) [2] that something unpleasant will happen to you if you walk down it.  But you walk down it anyway.

Not likely?  Actually, it’s very likely you have already done something quite similar.  You’ve started dating.  The unpleasant experience is dating abuse.

While many behaviors constitute dating abuse, they can be reduced to a single sentence:

Dating abuse is any behavior that seeks to deprive its victim of the independence and respect that the abuser demands for himself in the relationship.

The abuser, in short, seeks to turn his (or her) victim into a thing—an object serving the abuser’s ends, with little or no regard for the victim’s needs and wishes. 

All dating abuse is aggressive, but not all aggressive behavior within a dating relationship constitutes abuse.  Acts of physical aggression between dating partners may or may not stem from efforts by one partner to dominate and control the other.  And it is control, not aggression, that underlies dating abuse.

One study, for instance, found that 45 percent of high school girls and 43 percent of boys reported that they had experienced some form of physical aggression from a dating partner at least once in their dating experience. [3]   But the suggestion that this represents some sort of gender parity in violence is misleading.  In 70 percent of cases, girls reported that their male dating partner initiated the violence. [4]   And the reaction to violence was distinctly different.  The most common reactions reported by girls were fear, followed by emotional hurt.  For boys, the reaction was either amusement or anger. [5]   Clearly, if one partner is frightened and the other amused, the situations are not equivalent.

According to the most widely accepted estimate [6] , one high school girl in five will be involved in a physically or sexually abusive relationship.  Forty percent of girls aged 14 to 17 say they know someone their age that has been hit by a boyfriend. [7]

Some 61 percent of all rape victims are under 18, and one in three of them are raped by someone they have dated

Nor is that the worst that happens.  Nearly a third of all female teenage homicide victims are killed by a boyfriend or former boyfriend. [8]

As troubling as those statistics are, they represent only the most extreme forms of dating abuse.  If emotional and psychological abuse is added to the estimates, some studies have claimed that abuse occurs in over 90 percent of relationships. [9]

Again, it must be stressed that psychological, emotional and physical abuses are means to an end—the control and domination of one dating partner by the other.  

Tragically, it often works.  Nearly 80 percent of girls who have been physically abused by a dating partner remain in the relationship! [10]

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