Rihanna and Thousands More: Ending Youth Dating Violence

I don’t blame every parent when this happens to a girl. I know many of these cases can be traced back to attitudes girls and boys got at home.

But…as an ex middle school and high school teacher, I could also point to many, many cases in which it was the peer pressure the peer culture that created the problem. Think about the fact that in many high schools such as the one I last taught in, there was basically about 1 adult to every 16 or 17 kids. But that is counting lunch ladies, janitors, teacher’s aides, secretaries, all adults. Most of the day, however, in the lives of these kids–in passing periods, lunch breaks, before and after school, etc.–there was no adult around. Parents were working; teens were on their own with the means to travel and go places where they could get in trouble.

Teens are master manipulators. Most can play “Eddie Haskell” very well, and many of the adults don’t see them enough to see through their masks.

I’m telling you that pack behavior exists in feral kids (which is what I call them since so many roam freely) as much as in feral dogs.

Raising nice boys and girls in our society is very, very hard when there are so many ways that adult influence can be undermined.

I was always astonished at the stories I would hear from my journalism kids about what really was going on with some of the popular kids whose parents, I could imagine, were busy composing their Christmas letters about the outstanding achievements of their children.

Tom Cat: you would be exactly wrong. I know many young women (my own daughter included) who have been in physically abusive relationships even though they came from homes where they were valued as human beings and taught never to accept such treatment, and never witnessed such behavior.

This phenomenon is more likely tied to the pop culture of the younger generations. The younger generations of men are waaay more sexist and disrespectful of women that my (baby boomer) generation and the generations before us. It began with the Sexual Revolution of the sixties. Men started expecting sex on demand once Victorianism died and birth control appeared. Even in the sixties, if a guy took a date to dinner, he assumed he was entitled to sex. The violence followed.

Music, movies, books. Sending students from a violent ghetto culture into middle class public schools where those students had little defense against a violence they had no experience with. Instead of elevating white middle class people, bussing dragged all the younger generations down into a ghetto, gang mentality. I saw it first hand at my children’s schools. It all supplies the wrong message to young women. That’s why the younger women all fell at Obama’s feet: he’s black and completely misogynistic.

Unfortunately for so many women, excepting Rhianna of course, they discover they are in an abusive relationship after they have become financially dependent on the abuser. I had a friend who volunteered at a Women’s Shelter–a professional woman. She told me over coffee one day that she had little faith in programs offered to abused women at the shelter because she knew the underlying problem was money. If she had $100,000 dollars to hand any of these women, they would flee and their problems would be over.

but our media sucks

and don’t forget the women in our army:
http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=46674

(an estimated 80% of sexual assaults/rapes go unreported).

“According to the DoD Report on Sexual Assault in the Military for Fiscal Year 2007, “There were 2,688 total reports of sexual assault involving Military Service Members,” of which “The Military Services completed a total of 1,955 criminal investigations on reports made during or prior to FY07.”

The criminal investigations yielded the shockingly low number of only 181 courts martial.
…

A 1995 study published in the Archives of Family Medicine found that 90 percent of female veterans from the 1991 U.S. attack on Iraq and earlier wars had been sexually harassed. A 2003 survey of women veterans from the period encompassing Vietnam and the 1991 Iraq attack, published in the American Journal of Industrial Medicine, found that 30 percent of the women soldiers said they were raped.

In 2004, a study of veterans from Vietnam and all wars since, published in the journal of Military Medicine, found that 71 percent of the women were sexually assaulted or raped while serving.”

Bingo! They will not change not ever. I fund raise for women’s shelter and it is a fretful trend among young girls. The younger you reach them the better

HARP: You are so right a safety plan all women need one

Do you think perhaps the lack of an adult male who is the one who tells the boys that it is NEVER acceptable to strike a girl is what is missing ?
The MEN were the people that set the rules for what wasn’t done around or to women, what wasn’t spoken or said to them, out of respect. No reason was ever needed, it was understood as a rule, due to differences, obvious differences that are accepted.
Nowadays, with “equality” rising – confusion exists, the adult male(s) is(are) too often missing or unable to lay down rule, or fail to.
If a young boy or young male was never impressed with the rule by an adult male that was respected, what is the result ?
Boys are often still expected to tussle or fight – or when they do it does not carry the same set of issues as this, and is less often a relationship problem (although that may be on the rise or at least heard of more often). Girls are now publicly talking about fighting eachother, often with vulgar phrases that are part of pop culture. It’s played as a joke or entertainment to hear one say what they will do to the other… often the “joke” becomes reality, with encouragement – it makes “equality” real.
Rules have changed, perceptions have changed, the delivery of those set rules has changed. There are other factors, and results, for instance the youtube fight videos, that often involve a group attack, many girls on 1, or 1 on 1 fighting with the crowd watching and encouraging it. Evidence.

I should perhaps mention a religious factor as well. Our most popular tradition there carried the expectation that girls or young women would not be struck – as religion is ridiculed and belitted in pop culture, it’s tenets are lost in the youth – add in the spin of Islamic law in nations, and ridicule or ignoring tradional religious ideas here is made easier.
I dare say as far as youthful dating – traditionally more often hidden as a general rule, and therefore quite discouraging of physical fighting that could show evidence of contact atfeer the fact, is also lowered. Condom distribution or even emphasis in schooling in a mixed gender enviroment and societally considered of utmost importance, instead of encouraging hidden relationships and therefore less fighting – has the opposite effect – making the realtionships more publicly acceptable especially at the interyouth level. The video notes “text stalking” from “boyfriends” (likely means ex or unwanted “boyfriends” / suitors).
So there are more relationships, more open, in the group and obvious to the adults – with the resultant deeper seriousness and “frustration and intensity” that goes along with it, with the sexualized culture “condom additions” as merely a single example. Hence, more abuse.
I seriously doubt anyone is wiling in the majority to go back to stifling, suffocating, non litigious, adults in charge, spankings accepted, “religious” like norms.
Well, there are consequences.

Nonsense.

Hehe OK, the girls’ school will have all the college prep courses and sports, and the boys’ school will have remedial training, training for a trade job, and also clases on women’s herstory, fathering and nurturance.

separate but equal hahaha

Those separate schools are for the elite, (at least in Britain John Smith) – or were for the older generation who were taught respect from a young age.
I suspect nowadays, or rather see, that idea – well, you’ve been rebutted rather forcefully – (haha).
Yes, don’t spread those monied ideas around (religious schools too), very bad, very bigotted, we need everyone mixing and fighting like – as one said feral roving bands of animals. lol

John Smith: Amen. There is a vibrant movement toward that end.

yeah since separate but equal has worked out so f#cking well in the past.

Well, that’s telling, isn’t it oowawa? We’re quick to give lipservice to abhoring gender-based violence. But it really is a difficult battle when the popular culture is saying something else entirely.

Jamie Foxx has a 14-year-old daughter.

I make too may typos when I post mad.

What bullshit are they detecting….? Are you saying that they are detecting BO’s bullshit? Or are you saying that the violence and misogyny they’re hearing on their ipods – they detecting that bullshit…..?

Well, it’s something. If not abuse, what is it? It’s certainly not healthy, psychologically or medically. In my youth, in my time and place, boys didn’t even fight – let alone with girls – let alone girls fighting with other girls. I think there has been a huge uptick in the relationship (even friendship) violence that occurs in youth. Does it have anything to do with the middle class shrinking, and the working classes growing? I realize this singer must have money, but a lot depends on your upbringing, I think.

So DV has grown and is a serious issue, but now all types people (women, teenagers) are resorting to violence – well, it’s really “classing-down” our society – and what worse may come as these people become grownups?

I do realize that every generation thinks the last was stodgy and they want to be different. The 50s rock and roll era (think TV show “Happy Days”) was beginning when my parents were “rebelling”, the hippies were rebelling in the 60s, I had the opportunity to be a disco queen in the 70s. But all these generations of rebelling shared a happy outlook (the 60s encouraged drugs in that endeavor, but they were drugs to drop out and get inside their own heads, they weren’t about violence). Songs were about being in love.

I’m not counting acid rock, because it was fringe music and never the most popular. Maybe other eras had their own fringe music that was – well – anti-social. But much of the music now, instead of being happy and social – it turns the stomach of people like me – now it’s about killing cops, raping women, advocating violence, hating women in any way possible and definitely seeing them as objects. It’s all about anger, or more specifically, anger they don’t seem to want to work through. But the worst part is, where it once would have been “fringe” music, not heard that often, it is instead the most POPULAR, mainstream music.

When I realized that a fringe, anti-social type of music had become mainstream and popular, I knew something serious had changed in our country. It’s like all the kids have sunk down to the lowest common denominator – and love it! And yes, I ‘m one who feels such saturation with anti-social and violent themes will affect the kids’ moral compass.

judging from the pictures, she received a little more than a self-defense blow or two. and while i’m certainly not an official black spokesperson. i’d venture to say that as many black men are financially dependent on women as the other way around, but the violence seems to be a whole lot more glorified when it’s a man beating the crap out of a woman than the other way around.

obsp, the women speaking at the forum were not making this a racial issue because it is not. Nor is it an issue of economics. Abuse crosses every social boundary and women die. Thousands of women and children go to safe houses every year for protection and a new start. You are the obsp yet you seem unaware of the years slaves in this country suffered physical abuse without fighting back even though they may have been physically stronger because the problem is much more complex than your oversimplified view. Physical, mental and emotional abuse over a period of time destroy the will to fight back or leave.

The kids have already grown up and raised the coming generation, so you’re a whole generation behind with that. That’s what we’re seeing, the last 15-20 years, with the parent or perhaps less often parents already cultured in accpetance of “changed values” now incapable of stopping the violence or imparting the morality to their children and society being as a whole becoming equally incapable.
One might take a trip down communist infiltration lane and their plans at this point – some famously read into the congressional record in 1963 for instance, and their former operatives claims the results they pushed for (yes, using media and spokespeople and the schools and position of authority as tools) have been spectacular and beyond their wildest dreams.
It’s on “autopilot” and is feeding upon itself.