Senate Passes Resolution to Address Teen Dating Violence

On January 27, the Senate approved, by unanimous consent, a resolution (S. Res. 32) designating February 2011 as “National Teen Dating Violence Awareness and Prevention Month.”

Sponsored by Sen. Mike Crapo (R-IN), the resolution contains a number of findings, including:

• According to Liz Claiborne’s 2009 Parent/Teen Dating Violence Poll, approximately one in three adolescent girls in the United States is a victim of physical, emotional, or verbal abuse from a dating partner, a rate that far exceeds victimization rates for other types of violence affecting youth;
• According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, nearly ten percent of high school students have been hit, slapped, or physically hurt on purpose by a boyfriend or girlfriend in the past year;
• According to the American Journal of Public Health, more than one in four teenagers have been in a relationship where a partner is verbally abusive;
• More than three times (twenty percent) as many tweens as parents of tweens (six percent) admit that parents know little or nothing about the dating relationships of tweens (children between the ages of eleven and fourteen);
• Although 82 percent of parents are confident that they could recognize the signs if their child was experiencing dating abuse, a majority of parents (58 percent) could not correctly identify all the warning signs of abuse;
• Seventy-four percent of teenage boys and 66 percent of teenage girls say that they have not had a conversation with a parent about dating abuse in the past year;
• Sixty-five percent of college students who were in an abusive relationship failed to realize that they were in an abusive relationship, and 53 percent of such students said that no one helped them;
• Severity of violence among intimate partners has been shown to be greater in cases where the pattern of violence was established in adolescence; and
• Primary prevention programs are a key part of addressing teen dating violence, and many successful examples of such programs include education, community outreach, and social marketing campaigns that are culturally appropriate.

The resolution “calls upon the people of the United States, including youth, parents, schools, law enforcement, State and local officials, and interested groups to observe National Teen Dating Violence Awareness and Prevention Month with appropriate programs and activities that promote awareness and prevention of teen dating violence in their communities.”