youth

Time for some serious talk about men’s violence. I’ll break it down to make a difficult point really simple.

Number one: Men’s violence against women is a men’s issue.
Number two: Prevention is the best solution.

It’s been almost two months since Chris Brown’s infamous and brutal attack on Rihanna. With our three-second Twitters, four-second sound bites, and a five-second news story shelf lives, it’s like this assault happened a million years ago. It’s so easy to collectively forget and move on to the Next Big Story.

But think back to the leaked police photos of 21-year-old popstar Rihanna’s bruised and swollen face. Although her bruises may have faded along with our collective voyeurism, a crucial issue remains.

The National Coalition Against Domestic Violence reports that 1.3 million women are victims of assault by an intimate partner each year. Do the math. That works out to nearly two-and-a-half women assaulted every minute, typically by a boyfriend or husband.
We live in a culture that shrouds these facts of violence in secrecy, silence, and misunderstanding. We’re taught to confuse abuse with passionate love. Our culture links violence with romance with lines like, “Baby, I only hit you because I love you” — the kind of relentless refrain we see repeated in mainstream movies, TV, magazines, and music.

If a celebrity woman stays in a violent relationship, or gets back with an abusive guy, the takeaway for most people is that that male violence is not so bad. This insidious message, comments journalist Katha Pollitt, reinforces ideas that male violence is a natural part of life, and something in which women are complicit by provoking it, using it, even liking it.

This is dangerous misinformation. It contributes to a culture that normalizes violence and is accustomed to looking the other way, even with the rates of abuse so astronomically high.

But here’s the thing. Whether we’re talking about two megastars in Hollywood or the couple living right next door, we might scratch our heads and ask, “If he’s abusive then why does she stay?”

It’s a fair question. But the wrong one. The question that goes to the heart of the matter is Why does he hit?

Men are certainly victims of domestic assault. But the vast majority of cases are women hurt by men’s hands, words, and control. Direct service agencies and hospital samples indicate that men commit nearly 90 percent of domestic abuse. Yet, ironically, we’re trained to think of abuse as a woman’s issue. When we’re talking about male violence against women, says violence-prevention educator Jackson Katz, we’re really talking about a men’s issue.

This isn’t about blaming men. The point is more profound and the goal more constructive than that. The most effective way to end violence against women is to stop the problem before it happens. Doing so means we need men on board. We need men taking responsibility, getting in on the conversations about male violence, and refusing to be silent bystanders to the problem.

Rihanna and Chris Brown are high-profile cultural icons. Millions of fans look to them as trendsetters and culture creators. With media giving so much attention to their personal lives, the couple’s private relationship has powerful public impact.

The Rihanna-Chris Brown fan base skews young. So does abuse. Girls and women between the ages of 16 and 24 are more likely than any other group to be in abusive relationships. The NCADV reports teen dating violence is one of the major sources of violence in adolescents’ lives. A full 20 percent of dating couples report some type of violence in their relationship. Teen dating violence is particularly insidious because it happens at a time when young people are navigating intense relationships, sorting out their values, and laying emotional roadmaps for their futures.

A recent study of Boston teens that found nearly 50 percent of the 12-to-19-year-olds surveyed blamed Rihanna for getting hit. But this isn’t just about pop-star punditry. The issue literally hits at home. According to the Boston Public Health Commission, 71 percent of the teens they questioned said arguing is a normal part of relationships and 44 percent said fighting in relationships is routine.

This is startling.

So let’s seize this cultural moment to keep talking — really talking! — about masculinity, violence, and pop culture. Honest conversations across communities about male violence against women are crucial for the safety of teenagers at risk, for children who witness abuse, and for survivors everywhere. We need to start talking across communities because men’s violence against women is a men’s issue. And prevention is the best solution.

Another incredibly resource-rich guest post by domestic violence expert and friend of GWP Madeline Wheeler.  You can read Madeline’s previous posts here and here.  -Deborah

As we all know, by the end of National Teen Dating Violence Awareness and Prevention Week, Rihanna and Chris Brown made national attention with their violent altercation that had media moguls drooling, dropping the ethical bar, and sensationalizing a human health crisis. Is she pregnant?  Are they married? Whoopi tried to quell the hype on The View stating she doesn’t even know if it’s real—a girl may have hit Rihanna.  Oprah warned on Friday that “He will hit you again!” No intro could keep up with this media carousel.

My go round? Chris Brown is still a teenager! You may recall Deborah’s call for research on Teen Dating Violence (TDV) in Quick Stats: Teen Dating Abuse at the year’s start.   People may be getting the message that 1 out of 3 women around the world has been beaten, coerced into sex or otherwise abused, but what is not as widely known is that 1 in 5 teens in a relationship report being hit, slapped, or pushed by a partner.

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This review comes to GWP courtesy of Jenny Block, author of Open: Love, Sex and Life in an Open Marriage.  You can read more about Jenny’s work at www.jennyonthepage.com

My Little Red Book
Edited by Rachel Kauder Nalebuff
Twelve (Feb. 2009)

I wanted to like this book. I really did. I love the idea of it, women sharing stories about something that we’re not “supposed to” share stories about. The problem is that without stories from every corner of the globe, every generation, every rung of the socioeconomic ladder, and so on, what you end up with is redundancy.

And that is precisely the problem with Rachel Kauder Nalebuff’s My Little Red Book, I’m afraid. The material would certainly be terrific for an article, preferably written by a remarkable writer gifted with profound insight. And there certainly are a few pieces that were wonderful, like Patty Marx’s curt “Can I Just Skip This Period?” and Ellen Devine’s raw and humorous “Hot Dog on a String.” But for the most part, the pieces were generally the same.

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…what of the youth shaped by what some are already calling the Great Recession? Will a publication looking back from 2030 damn them with such faint praise? Will they marry younger, be satisfied with stable but less exciting jobs? Will their children mock them for reusing tea bags and counting pennies as if this paycheck were the last? At the very least, they will reckon with tremendous instability, just as their Depression forebears did.

This is an excerpt from a piece by Kate Zernike in Sunday’s Week in Review (always my favorite section!) about how these economic times will shape the generation just coming of age. In short, there were plenty of comparisons made to the tight-lipped, nose-to-the-grindstone depression-era babies—the grandparents who reuse tea bags and never buy lottery tickets. The author and her experts wondered, will the kids of today become stingy, safe, and square tomorrow?

I’m skeptical. As I research my new book, a collection of ten profiles of people under 35 doing interesting social change work, I’m coming across a very different trend. Tough economic times seems to have made young people creative and very practical—a stunning and hopeful combination. It’s not that they aren’t feeling the burn. It’s harder than it has been in decades to start a non-profit and get funding, for example. But here’s the thing: today’s youngest and most cutting edge thinkers aren’t really starting non-profits or trending towards traditional methods of making the world more just. They’re creating hybrid media companies, public-private ventures, drinking clubs, and secret societies. They’re rejecting charity models and trying to figure out how to get folks to align their own self-interests with altruistic causes. They’re thinking locally and globally simultaneously.

They’re not taking huge financial risks—either personally or with the funding they bring in, but that’s not keeping their philosophies or experiments “safe,” as the NYT predicts. It’s just motivating them to be incredibly creative, really resourceful, and organic in their interventions. What a silver lining, heh?

Richard E. Nisbett, a psychology professor from the University of Michigan, wrote an op-ed that appeared in the New York Times last weekend about the importance of funding educational programs that really work. All this stimulus package talk has breathed new life into an old conversation: how do we measure the effectiveness of educational interventions?

Nisbett insists that we not overlook the little things, namely boosting children’s self-esteem through high expectations. He writes:

Consider, for example, what the social psychologists Claude Steele and Joshua Aronson have described as “stereotype threat,” which hampers the performance of African-American students. Simply reminding blacks of their race before they take an exam leads them to perform worse, their research shows.

Fortunately, stereotype threat for blacks and other minorities can be reduced in many ways. Just telling students that their intelligence is under their own control improves their effort on school work and performance. In two separate studies, Mr. Aronson and others taught black and Hispanic junior high school students how the brain works, explaining that the students possessed the ability, if they worked hard, to make themselves smarter. This erased up to half of the difference between minority and white achievement levels.

In the age of Barack and Hillary, this is exciting news. The days of “you can’t be what you can’t see” are over for little girls or black kids destined for positions of powerful leadership.

But it’s also got me thinking of other implications for the “stereotype threat.” Is part of why young women are so plagued by eating and anxiety disorders that we are constantly reminded of a stereotypical version of ourselves (emotional, overwhelmed, perfectionist)? Would we be healthier if we were told that our quality of life was, indeed, under our control? How can we pull apart the cultural associations of femaleness and self-sacrifice/internalized anger/stress?

I struggle with this because I wrote a book that traces some of the contemporary causes of perfectionism behavior and disordered eating and exercise. Is Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters: How the Quest for Perfection is Harming Young Women inherently reinforcing an unhealthy perfect girl paradigm just by exploring it? It’s a pretty paralyzing thought, especially for a  feminist and cultural critic. I’ve always believed strongly in the importance of speaking tough truths, naming things, giving voice to pain. But what if, by mirroring the most painful aspects of my generation’s struggle, I’ve inflamed it?

Where is the balance?

–Courtney Martin

Well someone is paying attention at last. Judith Warner, who writes the Domestic Disturbances column for the New York Times, has a column today that delves into the question I asked two days ago: Why is NO ONE interested in the fact that studies have shown that teens as a group aren’t actually promiscuous?

Warner first describes how Linda Perlstein, the author of Not Much Just Chillin’: The Hidden Lives of Middle Schoolers, kept being called during the media frenzy over the “oral sex epidemics”:

“I’d say, ‘No one is doing that,’” she told me when I called her this week to refresh my memory of her story. “Even the sluttiest kids I knew, when I told them about that said, ‘Ewww. No one does that.’ This really prurient stuff was being way overblown.

“Believe me, I wanted to be on ‘Oprah.’ I had a book to sell. I’d say, ‘There’s lots of stuff to talk about. Stuff that really should be talked about, that’s more nuanced and complex.’ They were like ‘Thanks, but no thanks.’”

Warner has a theory well worth considering as to why society and parents insist on oversimplifying issues that relate to children’s loss of innocence:

All the examples of child myth-making that I’ve mentioned here have to do, at base, with the perceived corruption of childhood, the loss of some kind of “natural” innocence. When they depart from kernels of reality to rise to the level of myth, they are, I believe, largely projections that enable adults to evade things. Specifically, the overblown focus on messed-up kids affords parents the possibility of avoiding looking inward and taking responsibility for the highly complex problems of everyday life. [my emphasis]

In the case of the allegedly lascivious Lolitas, Kefalas sees this flight from reality very clearly: “People don’t want to hear about the economic context, the social context” to young teen sexual activity and teen pregnancy, she told me. “For a 14-year-old to be having sex it’s usually a symptom of a kid who’s really broken and really hurt. Those who are having sex without contraception are a distinct set: they’re poor, from single-parent households, doing poorly in school, have low self-esteem. Teen pregnancy is so high in America compared to other places not just because of access to contraception but because we have a lot of poverty. But Americans don’t want to see themselves as a poor society. They want to make a moral argument: if only teens had better values.” [my emphasis again]

It does seem rather fantastical to me that articles and authors group “teenagers” as a whole into one category, and then encourage parents to practice parenting based on a grossly oversimplified and sensationalized definition of what it is that teens do. It should be the responsibility of these authors and talk shows, particularly if they purport to care about teens’ lives and futures, to ignore the ratings and the talk show invites, to report fairly and with an eye to the specifics, both differences and overlaps, between groups of teens–and with an eye to root causes, far beyond and much more relative than “morality”, as to why some teens do engage in promiscuous behavior.

I teach a persuasive essay writing class to high school sophomores and every time a student hands in an essay draft, I inevitably hand it back with a big circle drawn around the intro: “You need to push this thesis–make it more complex, more sophisticated, more specific. Tell me how and why and in what way,” I write. We, as readers, as [future] parents, as once-teens-ourselves, have the responsibility to do the same for those who report on contemporary teenage behavior.

–Kristen Loveland

Just over a month ago, the New York Times featured a column by Charles Blow lamenting the state of young people dating (in case it’s not obvious, his main points: dating = desired; hooking up = “sad”). The column was filled with over-generalizations, most notably about “what girls want.” To see a more even-handed, inquisitive, if still problematic, article about our fairer sex’s needs, you should probably take a look at the New York Times Mag’s “What Do Women Want,” which includes such felicitous quotes as, “Meana made clear…that, when it comes to desire, ‘the variability within genders may be greater than the differences between genders,’ that lust is infinitely complex and idiosyncratic.” As a keen follower of many a cultural-sexual zeitgeist article, it was a refreshing moment.

Far away from the Op-Ed page in the NY Times’ Health section yesterday, there appeared yet another article that made me sniff the air and wonder, “Has change really come to America?” The article, titled “The Myth of Rampant Teenage Promiscuity” documented how, despite making guest appearances on Oprah as an “oral-sex epidemic” and on Tyra, the idea of millions of not-yet-legal Americans getting it wildly on, is, well, not totally the case. (For the record, the Guttmacher Institute rebutted the notion of a teen oral sex epidemic last year: their research showed that most teens who have had oral sex have also had intercourse, and only 1 in 4 virgin teenagers have had oral sex.)

Tyra’s shows, on a teen pregnancy epidemic and teenage unprotected sex, were at least more on topic, though like most TV hosts her unscientifically-surveyed data was thrown to the public replete with exclamation points and sad-face emoticons.

So what’s the real dish on teenage sex? The National Center for Health Statistics troublesomely reported this month that “births to 15- to 19-year-olds had risen for the first time in more than a decade.”

But does this necessarily mean a rise in teenage promiscuity? Of course not, as one perspicacious NY Times reporter, Tara Parker-Pope, demonstrates. Having done her research, Parker-Pope also reports that “Today, fewer than half of all high school students have had sex: 47.8 percent as of 2007, according to the National Youth Risk Behavior Survey, down from 54.1 percent in 1991” and goes on to write:

The latest rise in teenage pregnancy rates is cause for concern. But it very likely reflects changing patterns in contraceptive use rather than a major change in sexual behavior. The reality is that the rate of teenage childbearing has fallen steeply since the late 1950s. The declines aren’t explained by the increasing availability of abortions: teenage abortion rates have also dropped.

And indeed, as the Guttmacher Institute has reported, there has been a shift in sex education: in 2002 the proportion of teens likely to hear information about contraception had declined from 1995, while the proportion who were likely to have heard only abstinence information had increased.

Kathleen A. Bogle, an assistant professor of sociology and criminal justice at La Salle University and the author of “Hooking Up: Sex, Dating and Relationships on Campus” (N.Y.U. Press, 2008), who was also cited in the Charles Blow column, though in a very different context, closes off the article by telling everyone to basically just chill the hell out:

“I give presentations nationwide where I’m showing people that the virginity rate in college is higher than you think and the number of partners is lower than you think and hooking up more often than not does not mean intercourse,” Dr. Bogle said. “But so many people think we’re morally in trouble, in a downward spiral and teens are out of control. It’s very difficult to convince people otherwise.”

Of course, reporting that we actually shouldn’t be worried about teenage sexuality isn’t sexy –it takes away our society’s opportunity to fetishize the idea of forbidden, rampant teen sex, our society’s leeway to take a morally outraged and overwrought approach to young people’s sex lives. So why should I be surprised that the article hasn’t gotten anywhere near the “Most Emailed List,” even in the Health section, and even though the Blow column spent a number of days in front-page, Number One spot? I guess I’m not. I just wish I could be.

-Kristen Loveland

Image Credit.

In case you missed it, an article in today’s NYTimes (“A Rise in Efforts to Spot Abuse in Youth Dating“) highlights the increased prevalence of violence in teenage dating relationships.  Here’s a quick and depressing glance at the stats:

• According to a survey by the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene showed that dating violence had risen by more than 40 percent since 1999, when the department began asking students about the problem.
• Public health research indicates that the rate of such abusive relationships has hovered around 10 percent.
• According to a survey last year of children ages 11 to 14 by Liz Claiborne Inc., a quarter of the 1,000 respondents said they had been called names, harassed or ridiculed by their romantic partner by phone call or text message, often between midnight and 5 a.m., when their parents are sleeping.
• A study published last July in The Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine found that more than one-third of the 920 students questioned were victims of emotional and physical abuse by romantic partners before they started college.
• In the C.D.C.’s 2007 survey of 15,000 adolescents, 10 percent reported physical abuse like being hit or slapped by a romantic partner. Nearly 8 percent of teenagers in the survey said they were forced to have sexual intercourse.

The good news: “Last month, a group of Indianapolis organizations won a $1 million grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to help schools tackle the issue, part of $18 million in grants to 10 communities to help break patterns where children exposed to violence at home repeat it in their adult relationships.”

The bad news: There are no definitive national studies on the prevalence of abuse in adolescent relationships.

Clearly there is a need.  (AHEM – calling researchers!)

Had to peek my head outside the void once more to note that the top-emailed story on the New York Times website is about the “demise of dating”–yet another shocker of an article that misconstrues, simplifies, and wags its finger at the state of teenage sexuality. Read it here if you must.

The great thing about this one is that while it profoundly sums up teenage dating, or the lack thereof, as “sad,” Charles Blow, the author, hasn’t appeared to have spoken with one teenager about this issue–instead relying on the latest research. Of course, he provides no context for this research. And he plays into gender stereotypes, claiming that cons of hooking up “center on the issues of gender inequity. Girls get tired of hooking up because they want it to lead to a relationship (the guys don’t), and, as they get older, they start to realize that it’s not a good way to find a spouse.” Clearly guys aren’t interested in ever finding a spouse themselves. It’s truly amazing the number of strict binaries set up in this article: hooking up vs. dating (and never the twain shall meet); girl perspectives vs. guy perspectives; sad vs. not sad.

I don’t mind research into this “phenomenon,” (scare quotes very much intended), but this research is too often used to bolster scolding lectures, and researchers, or those who use the research for polemics, need tell us where this data is coming from: what age group, geography, socioeconomic status, etc, and acknowledge, even analyze, how this may play into their results.

Ok, back into the void. See you all in a week.

–Kristen

Two tidbits for your Monday morning, courtesy my colleagues at CCF:

“Study Suggests ‘Hanging Out’ on Facebook, MySpace Isn’t a Waste for Teens,” Joe Crawford, St. Louis Post-Dispatch

A study by the MacArthur Foundation concludes that interaction with new media such as Facebook is increasingly becoming an essential part of becoming a competent citizen in the digital age. And further, all that Web surfing isn’t necessarily eroding the intelligence or initiative of the young generation. “It may look like kids are wasting a lot of time online, but they’re actually learning a lot of social, technical and also media literacy skills,” said Mizuko Ito, a researcher at the University of California, Irvine who lead the study.

Teen Birth Rate Falls to 28-Year Low, John Fauber, Milwaukee, Journal-Sentinel
Contraception, abstinence, media campaigns all helping to influence city’s youth, experts say.