Study Shows High Rates of Dating Violence

One in five high school girls face violence from their boyfriends, according to a Harvard School of Public Health (SPH) study of Massachusetts students published this week in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

The study also found that adolescent girls who are physically or sexually abused by their boyfriends are more likely to binge drink, smoke heavily, use cocaine, exhibit unhealthy weight control behavior, have sex at an early age, and attempt suicide.

“Intimate partner violence” (IPV) is a national public health concern, according to lead researcher Jay G. Silverman, assistant professor of health and social behavior at SPH.

However, before this week’s study there had been no “reliable estimate” of how common IPV is among teenaged girls, Silverman said.

The study, which is based on results from the 1997 and 1999 Massachusetts Youth Risk Behavior Surveys, distributed in area high schools, is a “very important preliminary assessment” of dating violence among adolescents, Silverman said in an interview this week.

Silverman said the “high quality of the sample,” which included 1,977 responses in 1997 and 2,186 in 1999, should make “the public and politicians confident” in the study’s findings.

“It looks like these women are really in trouble,” he said.

The researchers found that young victims of IPV were four to six times more likely to become pregnant than those who had not been abused. These abused adolescents were also eight to nine times more likely to attempt suicide.

Silverman emphasized that the women are not at fault.

“The behavior we need to prevent is that of the young men,” he said. “What we have tended to do is to ask, ‘What is wrong with these young women that they are involved with these abusive partners?’”

Massachusetts is one of the first states to release guidelines for providing resources to deal with adolescent perpetrators and has ten pilot programs for violent boys, according to the research study.

“We’re basically way ahead of the curve. These programs are statewide, not just municipal initiatives,” Silverman said.