In Love and In Danger : Teen Victims of Dating Abuse Often Are Too Immature and Insecure to Escape Jealous, Sometimes Violent Boyfriends

Nicky’s memories of violence are whole and sharply focused, despite the many punches delivered to the back of her head over the years. As she sits at the dining room table in her Pomona home, her story comes in an unstoppable flow, like the tears of rage spilling over a dam of regrets.

Nicky was 12 when she fell in love with Richard. He was 13.

What Nicky has to show for their years together are a chipped tooth, a nose bent several degrees by his fist, three children--all of whom were born before their due dates because of beatings, she says--and emotional scars that are hard to fathom in someone so young.

She’s only 22, but if you ask how old she feels, she answers without hesitation, “I feel 40.”

Her earliest memory of abuse? “I was 13. When he went into high school, I was still in junior high and he didn’t trust me. One time I was wearing this see-through blouse. I had a slip on underneath it, because my parents taught me how to dress.

“(But) he got mad, and he pushed me on the ground and started calling me a bitch and everything. I thought, ‘Well he’s just mad, I shouldn’t have worn that.’ I couldn’t go home. What was I gonna tell my mom? So I went to school and I put on my P.E. clothes and that is what I wore all day.”

The incident would set the tenor of their relationship for the next 10 years.

In the last two decades, domestic violence has emerged from the black hole of taboo subjects to become highly visible. And what has long been happening between spouses or adult lovers is now recognized as a problem for teen-agers as well. Surveys show that about 28% of high school- and college-age students are in abusive relationships, roughly the same proportion as adults. But while adults have shelters and well-publicized hot lines, adolescents typically have only each other--if that. They often cannot or will not turn to adults for help and may not even talk to their peers.

The high incidence of adolescent abuse distresses Barrie Levy, a Santa Monica therapist and a founder of the Southern California Coalition for Battered Women. Levy, who edited the book “Dating Violence: Young Women in Danger” became aware of the problem in 1982 during a domestic violence education project in Los Angeles-area secondary schools.

“Our focus was on the development of an education program that would target adolescents, thinking that the way to start dealing with domestic violence was presumably before it started,” Levy says.

That presumption was wrong.

In school after school, children as young as 12 told her of abuse they had suffered at the hands of boyfriends, or of abuses they had witnessed among peers. It was harder for some of them to talk about relationship abuse than it was to discuss abuse from their parents.

Levy and other researchers found that abuse among adolescents can be emotional, sexual and physical. And, just as in adult relationships, girls are far more likely to be victimized than boys.

But teen-age dating violence is unique because adolescence is a fragile, confusing stage:

* Children on the brink of adulthood are loath to endanger their nascent independence by involving parents or other adults in the ugly aspects of their dating lives.

“The dating relationship is often a very intensely romantic one. The kids are very bonded to each other,” Levy says. “On one hand, she may want the safety and assistance of a parent to deal with the violence. On the other hand, she doesn’t want the parent to say, ‘You can never see this guy again.’ So she keeps going back and forth, feeling she can handle it herself and that if she figures out what to do, then the violence will stop.”

* Young, inexperienced lovers are unsure what is “normal” or acceptable in dating relationships. Experts say this allows them to misinterpret violence, jealousy and control as love.

“Teen-agers are so much more apt to look (to) their peers for what is normal,” Levy says. “They are so eager to conform and be like everyone else and to break away from the kinds of definitions their parents have set for them. We all know about physical abuse, but the emotional and sexual abuse is much fuzzier for teen-agers to define.”

* Adolescents are rigid about conforming to gender role expectations.

“Violence in dating relationships and marriages is reinforced by cultural norms that support the need for a hierarchy of power in human relationships,” says Denise Gamache, a Minnesota advocate for battered women, in “Dating Violence.”

* Most adolescents are caught in a web of social interaction so tight that they cannot easily break away from an abuser. After all, they probably see each other every day at school.

* Boys who abuse their girlfriends act out of jealousy and possessiveness stemming from extreme insecurity. Unchecked, these boys may become adult abusers.

“Once somebody finds that violence is the way to get what you want and feel powerful, it is hard to change unless you have some sense that there is something really wrong with it or you experience some sanctions like arrest,” Levy says. “A lot of kids . . . say that getting caught made a difference.”

Unfortunately, getting caught did not change Richard’s behavior toward Nicky.

“We were at school,” says Richard, a compact young man. “I don’t know what it was, but I pushed her and I hit her very hard. The (school police officers) seen us and it opened my eyes: What am I doing? They handcuffed me, which I deserved, and slammed me against a table. I was scared of myself and of what I was growing up to be. I was 13.”

But the incident did not end the violence. No charges were filed because of his age, the couple stayed together despite their parents’ protests, and Richard continued to abuse Nicky.

“She was the only person who was there,” Richard says. “And when you care about somebody, you take it out on them. I couldn’t do it on my mom and dad. They would hit me. So I would make up an excuse to blow up--’Why are you wearing that? What are you doing?’ ”

(Nicky and Richard said they wanted to tell their stories to help others. Nicky was willing to use her real name but Richard was not. Thus, both names have been changed.)

How can this kind of behavior go unchecked? For starters, adults often forget the intense emotional and sexual bonding they were capable of as teens. School officials sometimes ignore the relationship violence in their midst or perceive it as isolated incidents instead of what may be an escalating pattern. And most states do not recognize dating relationships in their domestic violence laws. (California does.)

But even when parents and school officials recognize it, they are often powerless to stop an abusive relationship.

Monitoring violence in schools “takes a continuous effort,” according to Carolyn Powell, a dropout prevention adviser at Jordan High School in Watts, in “Dating Violence.”

“We know that some students stop their abusive behavior only when we see them. But it is important to keep confronting them.”

In one case, Jordan met with a boy whose teacher overheard him verbally abuse his girlfriend. She met with the couple and helped them resolve the problem, but she admitted, “Not all situations work out this easily.”

Nicky’s parents forbade her to see Richard because they thought she was too young for a serious relationship. She defied them.

After the school officer saw Richard beat up Nicky and her parents had him arrested, Nicky was transferred to a new school. She responded by ditching classes to be with Richard. At 14, she became pregnant with their first child. Wearing baggy clothes, she disguised the pregnancy for six months. Her father, a mechanic, and her mother, a housewife, are devout Jehovah’s Witnesses. There was no discussion of adoption; Nicky kept the baby.

“If it wasn’t for the (officer), I would never have told my parents (about the abuse),” she says. “As it was, they didn’t like him and I didn’t want them to hate him more.”

This attitude is typical among abuse victims, experts say.

Repeated emotional and physical violence “tends to ensure that victims will do anything to please the abuser and avoid further violence,” says Gamache in “Dating Violence.” This might include lying to parents about bruises, refusing to press charges, dropping friends or stopping behavior that might induce jealousy, such as talking to other boys or wearing short skirts.

The cycle that defines abusive adult relationships also occurs with teens: a buildup of tension, an explosion, followed by regrets, remorse and an intensely romantic honeymoon. This “push-pull” dynamic keeps the relationship going, even as the violence escalates.

“I think jealousy is probably the most dramatic, visible pattern in the relationship,” Levy says. “Jealousy comes from a need to control. . . . It is hard for a guy to say, ‘I feel totally dependent on you because I love you so much and I am afraid you will leave.’ What a guy is more likely to say is, ‘You know you really need me, don’t you dare leave.’ And he will become vigilant and controlling and jealous of anything she might to do that threatens him and his dependence on her.”

Richard fits that pattern.

“I had got to the point where I wouldn’t let her wear this or that,” he says. “I didn’t like her to wear white because people could see through it. I would call her a whore . . .. I don’t know what it was. Maybe I was insecure and she is a very attractive girl.”

It is not unusual for parents to deny the behavior of their abusive child. Especially in families where the adults are violent or abusive to their children. Because the adults deny their own behavior, they do not perceive it as problem in their children.

Richard says that when he was 7, he forced himself, though terrified, out of his bedroom to push his father, who was beating his mother.

Yet, when Nicky would appear at Richard’s house with bruises, his mother would ask her, “What did you do to provoke him?”

Of course, it is not just children of abusive parents who experience dating violence. It can happen to anyone. Although researchers have found correlations between poor self-image and abuse, there is often nothing in a young woman’s history to suggest she will become a victim.

“All it really takes for a woman--for anybody--to be a victim,” says Levy, “is for somebody to be willing to victimize them.”

It can even happen to Miss America. After she was crowned Sept. 14, a Hawaii television station reported that Carolyn Suzanne Sapp obtained a restraining order against her professional football player boyfriend, Nuu Faaola, last year. In court papers, she claimed he “beat, kicked, punched, threatened to kill me, tore my clothes, choked me, took a knife and held it to my neck and skin, and emotionally threatened me.”

One recent conversation among members of a Los Angeles support group for teen-age mothers illustrates the depth of the problem.

In a little classroom of the Business Industry School, where the atmosphere can change from sorrow to giddiness and back in a flash, most of the girls say that yes, they have been hit by their boyfriends. Yes, their boyfriends tell them what to wear. Yes, their boyfriends beat them if they dress too provocatively. Yes, their boyfriends tell them they cannot go out with their friends. And yes, their boyfriends sometimes threaten to kill them if they say they are leaving.

As the girls work toward their high school diplomas, they spend two hours a day here in the parenting group run by Ruth Beaglehole, who directs the on-campus day-care center.

In their world, violence is the currency of love. Or what passes for love.

“I think he loves me,” says LaToya, 14, mother of a 15-month-old boy and daughter of a crack addict. “When he hits me, he says it’s for my own good.” She met her boyfriend, who is 18, when she was 12, two weeks after she was raped by strangers. Her boyfriend didn’t start hitting her until after the baby was born.

“When he hit me, I thought, ‘Oh, I deserved it. I have to think about what I did. I would apologize.”

Beaglehole asks Martha, a 17-year-old mother of two, if she has ever been hit.

“Yes,” Martha replies airily, “but I’m used to it.” Her parents hit her, she says, and her boyfriends have, too. Soon, she is sobbing quietly, her mascara making muddy tracks down her cheeks.

Beaglehole is holding her tightly. “Can you imagine all the hitting she has had in her life to get used to it?” she asks.

Beaglehole leads Martha around the inside of the circle, stopping in front of each girl as Martha says, with as much conviction as she can muster (and it isn’t much): “No one has the right to hit me.”

Beaglehole is doing what the experts recommend: offering education and peer support.

Some states have formal school programs. Minnesota, for instance, has one based on a 1984 curriculum developed by Levy and published by the Southern California Coalition on Battered Women. Some schools invite experts to present programs. But there is no consistent dating abuse prevention program in Los Angeles schools.

“There has been a good response to the need for this kind of education in Los Angeles,” says Levy, “but it hasn’t been implemented on a big scale.”

Nicky married Richard when she was 16 and pregnant with their second child.

“A lot of girls think it gets better when you get married, that it will change. I used to think, ‘God, why should he hit me anymore? Everything I do, he’ll see. Then he won’t have to accuse me. It gets worse because now they own you. They don’t, but they think they own you.”

For this couple, the abuse never stopped. In fact, it intensified after their third child was born.

He hit her when another man whistled at her. He hit her when she serenaded her daughter with nonsense lyrics to “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” (“Up above the world so high, where I meet all the guys”).

He slammed her arm in their heavy wooden front door. He kicked her with steel-toed boots as she laid on the ground. Finally, he broke her nose, and with that, something inside her repaired itself. A year and a half ago, she left him and, with the encouragement of her employer, joined a support group for battered women.

Richard claims the final episode has changed him, too.

“That is when I opened my eyes,” he says. “I never broke anything before.”

Now, he says, he wants her back and swears he would never hit her.

It’s too late, Nicky says. “I didn’t plan to stop loving my husband,” she says. “With me, something clicked, and I said, ‘I am not gonna go through this no more and that’s it.’ I just think 10 years of torture is enough.”

Is Your Relationship Violent? Barrie Levy, a Santa Monica therapist and abuse prevention specialist, offers this checklist as a way to tell if your relationship is abusive.

Abused

* Are you frightened of your boyfriend’s temper?

* Are you afraid to disagree with him?

* Do you find yourself apologizing to yourself and other people for his behavior when you are treated badly?

* Have you been frightened by his violence toward you?

* Have you been hit, kicked, shoved or had things thrown at you?

* Do you not see friends or family or do things because of his jealousy?

* Have you been forced to have sex?

* Have you been afraid to say no to sex?

* Have you been forced to justify everything you do, every place you go and every person you see to avoid his temper?

* Have you repeatedly been wrongly accused of flirting or having sex with others?

* Are you unable to go out or get a job or go to school without his permission?

Abuser

* Are you extremely jealous and possessive?

* Do you have an explosive temper?

* Do you constantly ridicule, criticize or insult your girlfriend?

* Do you become violent when you drink or use drugs?

* Have you broken her things or thrown objects at her?

* Have you hit, pushed, kicked or otherwise injured her when you were angry?

* Have you threatened to hurt her or kill her or someone close to her?

* Have you forced her to have sex or intimidated her so she is afraid to say no?

* Have you threatened to kill yourself if she leaves?

* Do you make her account for every moment she is away from you?

* Do you spy on her?

* Do you call constantly to check up on her?

* Do you accuse her of seeing other guys/girls?

Where to Call for Help or Referrals * The Los Angeles Rape and Battering Hotline: (213) 392-8381

* Outreach to Children, from anywhere in Los Angeles area: (818) 564-8878

* East L.A. Shelter (counselors speak Spanish): (213) 268-7564

* Women and Children’s Crisis Shelter, Whittier: (213) 945-3939

* Sojourn, Santa Monica: (213) 392-9896

* Haven Hills, San Fernando Valley: (818) 887-6589

* Women’s Transitional Living Center, Orange County: (714) 992-1932

* Interface Children, Family Services, Ventura County: (800) 339-9597 (ask for crisis desk)

* Su Casa, Southeast Los Angeles: (213) 402-7081

* Center for Women’s Studies and Services, San Diego: (619) 233- 3088

* Los Angeles Commission on Assaults Against Women, TDD line for deaf teen-agers: (213) 651-4610