A half-day program in high school may help reduce the verbal, physical and sexual abuse that mars many teenage dating relationships, a new study suggests.
Some 41 percent of females said they had been verbally or emotionally abused in a dating relationship in a survey of 1,547 high school students. About 15 percent reported physical abuse, and 14 percent sexual abuse.The worst problem appeared in ninth and 10th grades among girls in steady dating situations. Some 56 percent reported verbal or emotional abuse, 32 percent cited physical abuse and about a third reported sexual abuse.
The definitions of the various kinds of abuse were left up to the students. The survey was done in two schools in London, Ontario, in Canada.
A half-day program for students in the schools gave promising results for intervening in the dating abuse problem, said study co-authors Peter Jaffe and Marlies Sudermann, both of the London Family Court Clinic.
They described the results Saturday at a press conference before presenting their data at the annual meeting of the American Psychological Association.
For ninth- and 10th-graders, the program included a presentation about dating violence by a young people's theater group plus a videotape about early warning signs of violent dating relationships. Classroom discussion with representatives of community agencies and the school system followed.
Older students selected two workshops from a list covering such topics as date rape, male issues in relationships, anger control and violence in intimate relationships.
Participating students answered questionnaires about one week before the program and one week after to see what effect the program had.
Among the changes:
- The percentage of boys in ninth and 10th grades who said they thought forced intercourse was acceptable in long-dating couples dropped to 7 percent from 11 percent.
- The percentage of boys in those grades who said they thought forced intercourse was acceptable if "she sexually excited him" dropped to 16 percent from 20 percent. For girls the decrease was to 3 percent from 7 percent.
- Among all students, when asked what they would do at a party if a boy grabbed his girlfriend's arm to keep her from leaving, they said that after the program they were more prone to talk to the boy about it later or talk to a teacher.
Sudermann said a half-day program should be just the start of a longer-term effort in a school to reduce dating abuse.