As a parent, you instinctively want to protect your child, and to help him or her get away from violence and abuse. The most important aspect of taking action is to be thoughtful about what will work. You want to be effective at making your child safe, not just feel that you are doing something to ward off your own feelings of helplessness. You have two important tasks: to create a safety net for your child as well as a support network for you. Gathering information is an ongoing effort. Your situation will continue to change as you try ways of intervening and then learn from the results. There are many ways to go about these tasks, and you will find that you have to be flexible and adaptable.
You need to consider several factors when making decisions about what to do.
Do you know enough about what is going on in the relationship? Do you know enough about general tactics abusers use, the particular ways your child is being controlled, and the patterns in the violence your child is experiencing? How reliable is your information? Has it been confirmed by your daughter or other sources? Be sure you aren’t making decisions based on a story you tell yourself out of fear or anger.
What has already been effective? What hasn’t? Have circumstances changed, so that an approach that was not helpful before might work now?
Have you contacted national or local hotlines, such as the National Teen Dating Abuse Helpline or your local domestic violence shelter program? Do you have an advocate to help you think things through? Do you have a place your daughter can hide if necessary? Think of who could be helpful: your daughter’s friends, the local juvenile police officers, school administrators and counselors, or other supportive adults. There is a great deal of information available on the Internet to help with safety planning and strategizing. Also see the resources listed at the end of this book.
If the victim is ambivalent and has periods of time when she is hurt and angry with her batterer, or periodically breaks up with him, she will respond differently to intervention or planning than will the victim who is more consistently allied with and protective of her batterer. Does your daughter participate in discussions about getting away from the violence, even some of the time? Does she acknowledge your expressions of concern, or does she resist? How likely is it that your daughter will respond to your efforts?
The harsh reality is that sometimes relationship violence leads to serious injury or death. Even if it’s difficult to believe that a person you know, especially a teen, would or could kill someone, abusive relationships are often volatile and unpredictable, and “accidents” or impulses can cause serious harm.
Assess the risk of your teen’s situation and of any actions you or anyone else in your family might take. Engage others in your support network in helping you evaluate additional risks. Will your actions lead to more violence? What are safety needs that must be considered?
If you’re discovering that serious violence has been hidden from you, you need to assess the degree to which your daughter’s safety and perhaps your family’s safety are being threatened. This will make a big difference in the urgency of your interventions. If you determine that the threat of violence is serious, it is crucial to be connected to an advocate or an advocacy organization, and to assess the degree of risk.
If the abuser does one or more of the following, it can be a sign of the potential for serious injury or death:
Victims sometimes have a sense that their partner is capable of seriously injuring or killing them, and this can keep them trapped in the relationship. This sense or intuition is hard for everyone to understand and is why lethality assessment is so important.
Are there friends, family members, school staff, coworkers (yours or your daughter’s), a counselor, or others who are aware of your situation? Do they listen and understand? Are there ways in which they can be helpful—to help you cope, to help ensure your daughter’s safety?
Factors such as your health, your availability, the needs of another child or family member, or any number of other circumstances can affect your decisions.
The focus of this section is on the victim’s safety, whether she stays in or leaves an abusive relationship. Parents can feel empowered by helping their teen with safety issues. While a battered teen cannot control the violence or the abuser, she is responsible for doing what she can to ensure that she is as safe as possible.
If your daughter is being abused, you can help her use her strengths to plan for her safety. She knows the abuser and his patterns better than anyone—although she may not realize that until you tell her. She knows what kinds of situations are the most volatile for him—and the most dangerous for her. For example, does he become violent when he drinks at parties? What are the safest ways to leave such situations, based on his particular patterns? You can help her remember and take credit for the times she has been strong in dealing with or avoiding the violence.
Knowing patterns is helpful when planning for safety, but you must also be prepared for the unexpected. You need to be vigilant and aware, and ready to adapt to the ever-changing situation.
If she is not going to break up with him, or is considering it but isn’t ready yet, you can try to brainstorm strategies with your daughter so that she is prepared with possible actions she can take when he is enraged or harassing her, or when the tension is building. If she is ready to break up, you can help her make a safety plan to prepare for his explosive reaction to the breakup and the harassment that often follows as he tries to get her to come back to him.
An important step when planning for safety is preparing yourself to take action by making a commitment to deal with the reality of the situation, and a spectrum of possible problems you may encounter. If you are prepared by being able to think clearly without being frozen or agitated by fear, you are better able to handle an emergency situation, and to think about ways to keep an emergency from happening.
There are many different ways to plan for safety. The plans that will work for you depend on the particular characteristics of your situation. Brainstorm safety plans with everyone in your family, and include others who might be key participants in helping keep your daughter safe. Some things to consider include the following:
Parents can work together with their teen to create a successful safety plan, as illustrated in Jessica’s story.
Jessica was in her junior year in college, attending a university three hours from home. She lived off-campus with her boyfriend, Ken. At first they had fun together, but tension began soon after she moved into his apartment. He worked off and on, and had trouble sticking with one job. He had a bad temper and had fits of rage when he couldn’t get his way. Jessica hated fighting, so she gave in to him. He punched her on a few occasions. He was manipulative, especially about their finances. He spent her money, buying things on impulse, and even used her credit card without her knowing it. She became more and more stressed, and started having trouble with her schoolwork. One day she called her parents, sobbing, and asked them, “What should I do?” Over the next few days, Jessica and her parents came up with a plan.
The first stage in Jessica’s safety plan took place via phone calls and e-mails with her parents. Her parents advised her to put her important papers, money, and keys—anything she might need in an emergency—in a safe place. She stored some other belongings at a friend’s place in case she needed to get out of the apartment to safety without much time to prepare.
The second stage of her safety plan started when Jessica decided to leave school and go home to think. The day she left, she told Ken she was going home for a visit with her parents. She left quickly, to avoid a prolonged (and possibly violent) argument with Ken. She took her emergency items with her, along with a few other valuables she feared Ken would destroy if he had an outburst of rage while she was away.
The third stage took place while she was at home with her parents. During this time, her parents listened to Jessica’s accounts of what had been going on. Although they were upset and frightened, they listened calmly and realized they needed more information. They called a domestic violence hotline, and all three of them were able to get questions answered and the support they needed. Jessica started to see a counselor. On her second day at home, Ken started relentlessly calling, e-mailing, and texting Jessica, at her parents’ home number as well as on Jessica’s cell phone. She told him to stop contacting her, that she needed to think, and that she’d contact him when she was ready to talk. She blocked his number from her cell phone and unfriended him on Facebook, and the family started screening all their calls.
During this time, Jessica’s parents saw how Ken treated her, especially when he was desperate and angry. They became anxious and frightened for Jessica, and stressed about what to do. The family agreed to take breaks from the stress, and set boundaries about times they wouldn’t talk to or about Ken or think about him. They spent time on positive activities, such as exercise, outings, and dinners with family and friends. They all became better able to think clearly about what to do next.
Eventually the fourth stage became clear to Jessica. She decided to end the relationship and to begin the process of making the major changes that were involved. She decided to drop out of school for the rest of the semester and to move home. With her counselor, she prepared to tell Ken that she was leaving him, and to say good-bye to her friends and her life at school. She and her parents met with the counselor to plan a safe way for Jessica to go to the apartment to get her things and to be prepared for Ken’s unpredictability. They talked with advocates and a law enforcement officer about the help available to prevent any violence—for example, going with her to move her things out of the apartment. They made a plan for how to deal with Ken’s persistent efforts to pressure her to come back.
Looking back later on this difficult time, Jessica and her parents remember it as incredibly stressful, but they were all relieved that they were able to plan together so that Jessica did not get hurt.
Teen dating violence is everybody’s business. However, you and your teen may not want other people to know about it. Maybe you are embarrassed or afraid people will think badly of you. You might feel people won’t understand why the battering relationship has been going on for such a long time. You might be private about your family’s ups and downs in general. Or perhaps you are afraid that family and friends might become involved in the violence. But it is a good idea to include trusted family and friends.
By involving family and friends, you expand your resources for dealing with an extremely difficult and often dangerous problem. You are creating a safety net and a support system. You are getting the problem out in the open. You are taking it seriously and getting strategic support.
Your family and friends are important resources for your battered teen. This group includes brothers and sisters, grandparents, aunts and uncles, and cousins, as well as friends of your family. They can each be helpful in many ways. Perhaps they can provide a place to stay for the victim to get away from her abuser. They can be on alert for signs of danger and for opportunities to help. They can be supportive and can listen (sometimes more objectively than parents) as your teen makes decisions (about breaking up, for example).
These support people can offer direct opinions without getting the hostile reactions a parent might get. In some instances, friends and/or family might all get together to discuss the situation openly and provide support and understanding to your daughter, to you, and to one another. People acquainted with the abuser might talk to him so he knows that his girlfriend is not isolated and that he is being watched.
Your friends and family members also have friends, contacts with other resources, and other ways to expand your network of information, support, and safety. Your daughter can feel surrounded by love and support—and by realistic perspectives about her relationship.
In chapter 11 you read about how Barbara brought her family together for discussions about Tanisha so that they could talk about the violence in her relationship, how it affected all of them, what was going on currently, and how they could handle it. Barbara’s family didn’t all agree on what to do, but they did agree that they thought and planned better as a group than they did individually. Barbara believes that her family stayed sane through the rollercoaster of Tanisha’s two-year relationship because of these discussions.
If you have some contact with your daughter’s friends, they can be a resource as well. You can ask them about what they are noticing in her relationship. You can express your concern, tell them you are worried, and tell them why. They may be concerned too, and they might be relieved to talk to you. Teens tend to want to solve their problems on their own; they tend not to ask parents for help. But sometimes when they are afraid or don’t know what to do, they are relieved when a parent asks for their help. Good friends of teens who have been seriously injured or killed by their boyfriends have suffered tremendously afterward when they realized they didn’t tell anyone what they knew.
Your daughter’s friends can be “upstanders”: allies who support her by safely speaking up or getting help instead of ignoring what is going on in front of them. You may be able to give your daughter’s friends information about ways to help her. They can contact you or talk to someone at school if she is in danger. They can stay close to her and get others to join them when their presence may keep the batterer from hurting her. They can encourage the batterer’s friends to talk to him about the seriousness of his problem. Telling your daughter’s friends that you appreciate that they are “hanging in” and keeping her from being isolated lets them know they are doing the right thing.
There are two families involved in a teen’s violent relationship: the abuser’s family and the victim’s family. (If you are the parent of a teen who is abusive, see also chapter 18.) If your teen is being abused, you may consider contacting the abuser’s family. This might help you find out more about your daughter’s situation. You may find that the abuser’s family knows nothing about the kinds of problems their child is having. They may have suspected it, or they may have seen some of the violence themselves, but they may not realize the real scope of the problem. Or it may be completely hidden from them. Hearing from you might have an impact on them and lead them to take this seriously. You may find that working with the other family can successfully address the situation and get the abuser the help he or she needs.
Theresa and Joe’s story illustrates how two families can work together to help a victim in an abusive relationship.
Theresa and Joe had discovered that their daughter’s boyfriend, Charles, was abusing her. They had talked with Charles’s mother about his violence. She didn’t think she could stop him from doing any of the destructive things he did, especially because of his serious drug problem. But several times she called Theresa and Joe to alert them that Charles was enraged and looking for their daughter, or that he had her there and they should come get her before she got hurt. With these warnings, the family was better able to protect her.
Often, the abuser’s family is protective and defends their teen. They may not listen, and they may even blame the victim. Other families are overwhelmed by their teen’s violence and feel powerless to do anything about it. They may listen, shrug, and say they can’t do anything. They may be afraid their teen will be arrested. Other families may not see their teen very much, or perhaps he lives with a sibling or a friend, and his family doesn’t see themselves as being involved in what he does.
There is no way to predict how the abuser’s family will react. You may know enough about him to know that his family life is chaotic and filled with problems. You may be right not to expect them to be helpful. But talking with them is a strategy that is often overlooked, and is worth trying if there is even a remote chance that it can help either or both children.
Your neighbors and (if she is not living with you) your daughter’s neighbors can be a part of her safety net. You can tell neighbors what is happening in the relationship, and alert them so they can respond when necessary. For example, they could help her directly or call you if they hear her crying for help. You can also learn about aspects of the abuse from neighbors who have seen incidents outside your house or in your apartment building. For example, neighbors could tell parents about an ex-boyfriend stalking their daughter outside. Neighbors may be reluctant to “get involved” until you directly ask them. Once you have talked to them, they may be more likely to come to her aid, or call you or the police if they see your daughter being harassed or beaten. Jill’s story illustrates how neighbors can be helpful.
Pamela talked to a neighbor in the apartment building where her seventeen-year-old daughter, Jill, was living with her boyfriend. This elderly woman was afraid of getting involved in the violence she suspected was taking place next door. But a short time after talking with Pamela, the neighbor called her when she found Jill in the front yard, unconscious and bleeding. Taking this action saved Jill’s life. That also turned out to be the incident that was the turning point for Jill, and she began to break away from the relationship as she recovered from her injuries.