A coda to my last blog, if you will allow -- a survey published today says that a third of teenage girls are or have been abused by their boyfriends. A THIRD!!! And the abuse ranges from bullying through intimidation to rape. What is happening here? This is a whole new generation of battered wives...
It's a very worrying trend. What happened to the New Man? Are we, as romance writers, closing our eyes to the awful truth/ What do you think?
6 comments:
Abuse is such a taboo subject. Sad really, because it exists. I've tried writing non-fiction articles on the subject for years. The magazines geared towards parents of teens or teens in general just don't want to deal with the reality. These statistics don't surprise me, but it scares me having two teenage daughters.
I don't think romance writers have anything to do with this trend and some of us do write about abusive men and heroines who escape from them. It's a pretty scary statistic and I don't want to believe it's true. If it is, then it's a flat out awful trend and maybe we need an intervention in high school like we have for drug and gang prevention.
Sadly, I think it's been this way for... well, I'm 39 and as a teen... this was common. I think now people are more aware of it. I think now people talk about it.
Abused and pregnant, too. I saw a list of the cities where 28%-26% of teenage girls were having repeat pregnancies. Cannot recall if they were married or not. But hey, who cares? These young women are damaging their own bodies and their futures, as well as bringing babies into the world who, stats say--and so does common sense, will not be cared for.
Nothing substitutes for the love of 2 parents. Not churches. Not schools. And sadly, later, not even prisons.
Too much stress is made on TV and movies about looking sexy and finding someone early in life. I think young girls settle for someone, anyone to "have" a boyfriend and suffer the consequences of losing control in relationships so that things get out-of-hand.
Absolutely right, Marianne. The media has a lot to answer for. Looking sexy, looking thin, looking young... And yet, if a girl is raped, often the defence is that in looking sexy she was 'asking for it'. I despair, sometimes.
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