06 July 10
Teen Violence More Common Than Pregnancy
Teenage girls are more likely to suffer from dating violence than to become pregnant or be injured in a traffic accident.
This is something that I long suspected to be true, long suspected as in it seemed more common when I was a teenager than the media reported. I heard story after story about teenage pregnancy and how sex education wasn’t working, and how birth control availability was the problem, and how things were really better in the ’50s and we needed to go back to those days. (Of course, I didn’t hear about The Girls That Went Away until college or after and we don’t hear much about this side-effect of the shaming of pregnant women that took place before the 70s.)
But one thing the article mentions, and is something to keep in mind for most places, but reporting is controlled at a county level, not a state level. And counties vary on what they report about and how they react to domestic violence. Very few counties have domestic violence agencies within them, and counties that are more “old skool” are less likely to provide orders of protection or report domestic violence. I’m sure things have changed considerably since the mid-80’s when I was last involved with a DV agency.
And the other thing to consider is that this report only cases where dating violence got so bad that it required an order of protection, and pregnancies that didn’t result in miscarriage. I’m sure both of those numbers would affect the report results. And from what I knew in high school, the vast majority of girls who were “abused” by their boyfriends didn’t call it that, the same way that I think most women who are abused don’t call it that. They would say that their boyfriend was “really passionate when he was angry”, or that he “often did things he regretted”, or that he “just had a horrible temper sometimes.”
But it’s interesting. And it’s another sign that the pro-life movement is really just anti-abortion rights, and not pro-life, or they’d be concerned about what was happening to these children. Because even though teenagers get in relationships that turn violent, they’re still legally children and should receive all the protections that the law provides them.
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