When What Your Teen says Scares You
A big part of the prevention work we do at The Sunflower Project is talking explicitly about healthy and abusive relationships to middle and high schoolers. It seems so simple, but it barely exists. A lot of adults assume (or absent-mindedly hope) that the teenager in their life is “smart enough” or “well adjusted enough” to know what’s healthy and what’s not in a relationship, be it romantic, familial or friendly. And the truth is: THEY AREN’T, nor should they be.
They’re teenagers, it’s not their job to keep themselves safe — that’s our job. And of course we can’t always do that, no matter how hard we try, but teaching them in clear, certain terms about the very real dangers that exist when they start entering romantic and/or sexual relationships (and yes, they are doing that, whether you want to face it or not!) is the very least we can do.
To give you some context, I was a “smart”, “well adjusted” teenager. I had great friends, and came from a home where very loving marriages were modeled for me by my parents and both sets of my grandparents. And yet, here are some of the things I believed:
Jealousy is a form of love, and if my boyfriend is jealous it means he loves me a lot, and it’s one of his “cutest” traits
Trust is something I have to prove I am worthy of, and it can (and should) be taken away at any moment if I don’t do the right thing
His traumatic past is a reasonable excuse for actions like demanding access to my phone and passwords to my social media accounts
Promising me that he will trust me after I perform sexual acts for him is normal and reasonable
Now, if an adult in my life had written it all out like that and shown it to me, I might not have said “oh yes, that’s all true”. But because no one put it in those explicit terms for me, and because I lived in a world with social media and popular culture portraying these behaviors as “normal”, my abusive partner was able to essentially brainwash me into believing all of that. It’s a major factor in my staying with him for 11 months, and nearly dying because of it.
I was fifteen. Even though I thought I was an adult, the adults around me should have known that I was not, in fact, an adult, and should have given me explicit, clear information about what is healthy and what is not. I’m not saying that would have 100% prevented things, but it certainly would have given me a fighting chance.
One more caveat — I’m writing this from the perspective of the survivor, not perpetrator, because that is what I have experienced. I will do another blog post at a later date about how to spot signs of your teenager possibly perpetrating abusive behaviors towards their partner, which I believe is more effective in preventing abusive relationships (and yet way less focussed on in the gender based violence advocacy world).
With that, here’s an incomplete list of things you may hear your teenager say that should raise some red flags (and what you might want to say to them in return):
“It’s so cute how jealous he gets” / “She never wants me to hang out with anyone else, because she loves me so much she wants me all to herself” / “He said I can’t hang out with you anymore, sorry”
These are huge red flags, and may point to a partner being controlling over your teenager’s time and social life. Of course in every relationship, especially in the beginning, couples want to spend tons of time together. But a partner deciding when you can or can’t see other people, or who you can or can’t hang out with, is never okay.
Framing it as “cute” or “because they love me” would make my ears perk up, because it sounds to me like an excuse that’s been given by the abuser, justifying extreme actions like controlling someone’s time and social life.
Something you might want to say:
You know, jealousy actually has no place in a healthy relationship. Even though jealousy is a totally natural feeling, a healthy partner should be able to recognize that jealousy is caused by their own feelings, not by you. They should be able to work through their jealous feelings without demanding that you change your behavior. If they can’t, then they aren’t ready to be in a relationship.”
“He is worried that I’ll cheat on him but that’s only because he’s been cheated on so many times before” / “She doesn’t like when I see my guy friends because she’s had a bad experience with that in the past” / “He hates when I dress this way because he says his ex used to do that, and she really hurt him”
A partner using their past as an excuse for abusive behavior is manipulative and toxic. Forcing a partner to change their behavior because of your past is rarely acceptable (an acceptable situation might be something like in a case where a partner has PTSD and the requested behavior change is reasonable and does not hinder a person’s enjoyment of their life and independence).
This is often a slippery slope that can lead to more extreme, even violent, behaviors. It may seem benign at first, but it is a red flag that a relationship may be heading towards a toxic turn in the future. In my case (and in many cases), my partner would always conveniently have a ‘past experience’ that gave him an excuse to continue controlling my life. In retrospect, I’m sure most of those ‘past experiences’ were made up, and fabricated only to control me.
Something you might want to say:
Of course a person’s past is going to influence who they are, and what they prefer in a partner. But if someone is using their past against you, and forcing you to make up for the problems they’ve faced in other relationships, then they probably are using their past to guilt trip and manipulate you. You can help your partner work past their previous problems, but you shouldn’t have to change your life to accommodate them, especially if the changes they demand are making your life less enjoyable for you.
“Well, he said he has a boundary of me not going out at night” / “She said I’m disrespecting her boundaries if I sleepover at a friend’s house” / “He told me I crossed his boundary when I wore that outfit”
This is a HUGE red flag, and one that I think kids and adults alike miss a lot. There’s so much online discussion of words like “boundaries” that the real meaning of them has been totally lost. It’s a prime place for abusers to manipulate their partner into behaving the way they want, and using guilt-trip tactics to begin brainwashing their partner into being controlled by them.
It’s important to know the actual definition of a boundary, which is a rule you have about your life and actions, not anyone else’s.
Something you might want to say:
So, those actually aren’t boundaries. A true boundary is a rule you have about your own actions, like ‘I’m not comfortable going to that party’ or ‘I have a boundary around what sexual acts I want to do’. A boundary is not about anyone else’s actions. If someone says their boundary is about how you act, then they aren’t using that word correctly, and what they’re actually doing is trying to manipulate you by making you feel like you have to do what they want you to do or else you’re “crossing a boundary” and should feel bad about yourself.
“He said he doesn’t trust me yet” / “She said she can’t trust me until we are together for six months” / “He won’t trust me until we have sex”
Trust should be given, not earned, in all relationships. Of course, in a healthy relationship trust might be broken, and then the partnership works together to rebuild that trust, but an underlying basis of trust in the first place is required for a relationship to be healthy.
When the concept of trust is something that is dangled in front of you like a carrot, it’s never actually about trust, it’s about manipulation and control. And the bar will keep moving, and trust will never be ‘earned’.
Something you might want to say:
It sounds like your partner has a really hard time trusting people, which might mean they need some time before they can be in a healthy relationship. If they have trust issues, that’s unfortunate, but it’s on them. You can’t change that about them, they need to work on that themselves. In the meantime, if they are dangling trust in front of you as a way to force you to act a certain way, or do something (especially something sexual), that isn’t respecting you, that’s manipulation.
In a perfect world, adults would be having these sorts of explicit conversations with the pre-teens and teens in their life all the time. But we all (myself included) just assume that relationships are something that teenagers will just figure out on their own, and we all think that our kid could never hurt someone, or get hurt by someone, in this way. We might have a ‘sex-talk’ with our teen, but that’s often the extent of it.
The reality is that a huge majority of teenagers experience some sort of inter-partner violence or abuse before the age of 18. So, even if these conversations make your skin crawl, and make you want to smush your teenager back into their toddler-sized self, you, as the adult, need to get through that discomfort and have these conversations — and not just say it once, but say it repeatedly, in multiple contexts, at many different times in their life — for the sake of their health and safety. I’m not trying to be alarmist, but truly no one is safe from these sorts of relationships if they are never given the tools to spot them.
The last thing I’ll say is that whether or not your teenager is able to avoid abusive relationships, it is vital that you be a safe adult for them to come to if they ever experience anything like this (or if they have a friend who is). Sometimes, a teen’s safe adult isn’t their mom or dad, but it’s their older sibling, neighbor, teacher, coach, aunt or uncle, youth pastor, etc. You may not have teenagers of your own, but you might be a safe adult for a teenager anyways, and so it’s also on you to make sure they know, in no uncertain terms, that if they ever worry they may be experiencing abuse that they can talk to you in a judgement-free, safe space. That means you won’t hold it against them (meaning, you won’t get mad when they inevitably go back to their abusive partner, as it on average takes a survivor 7 attempts to break up with an abusive partner), you won’t force them to tell you details they aren’t ready to divulge (like what sexual acts they have or haven’t done), and you will support them whether they decided to take action to get mental or legal help, or not. My safe adults were my cheerleading coach, my dance teacher, and my parents, and without them I would not have survived.
If you think your teenager might be in an abusive relationship, but they won’t talk to you directly about it, try offering details of your own relationship history that frames healthy and abusive relationships clearly. Or, watch a movie or TV show together that portrays relationships, and comment out loud when you see something healthy or unhealthy. You can also share online resources with them — one of the most robust resources available is the National Domestic Violence Hotline’s Love is Respect initiative. You can also call the National Domestic Violence Hotline for more help at 800-799-SAFE.
While there’s no sure-fired prevention for abusive relationships, adults have a responsibility to try to keep their teenagers safe from this pervasive and largely invisible issue, and getting past discomfort in order to have these conversations is one of the most important ways we can all keep the teens in our life safe, happy, and loved.