This episode of Narrative continues our recognition of National Domestic Violence Awareness Month.
The CDC reports that among high school students who are dating, around 1 in 12 said they had experienced physical violence from their partner, and about 1 in 10 had experienced sexual violence. And some teens are at greater risk than others. Female students experienced higher rates of dating violence than males. And those identifying as LGBTQ reported higher rates of dating violence than heterosexual students.
Sara Barber, executive director of the South Carolina Coalition Against Domestic Violence and Sexual Assault (SCCADVASA), recently visited our studios to explain the key to ending this type of abuse.
Help is available 24/7 by calling the National Domestic Violence Hotline at 1-800-799-SAFE (7223). If you’d rather text, send the word “START” to 88788, or you can chat by visiting thehotline.org.
TRANSCRIPT:
Barber: To end domestic and sexual violence, we have to start with prevention. You know, we have to try and stop this happening in the first place. And that's a very high mountain to climb.
We also have a lot of barriers in, honestly, speaking about relationships in places where young people are, say, in schools. You know, in our state, we don't really like to talk about sex in schools. Well, if we're not going to talk about navigating sexual relationships, we're kind of missing a lot of the point in how you navigate a relationship. And so, we're sending people into relationships, intimate relationships, which are some of the most difficult things to navigate that we deal with in life with no training and no honest conversation. I mean, you wouldn't send someone out in a car without teaching them how to drive. But we're sending people who often haven't been brought up with healthy examples of relationships into relationships that are complicated. We’re in a culture that is not supportive and expecting them to do that well.
So, our prevention work is really aimed at multiple levels of prevention, trying to increase access to information about healthy relationships, to speak honestly about what intimate relationships are, to let people know how to identify if they've been assaulted and what resources are available to them.
Also looking at more environmental ways of doing prevention. So, looking at safety mapping in schools, in parks, in neighborhoods, trying to figure out where the safest places are or where bad things happen, and getting to think about prevention in this sort of broad cultural shift kind of way.
But it's hard to do. You know, we have two prevention staff. We live in a state of 5 million people. Trying to get that message out can be really tough when the culture in which we're trying to do it is so enveloping. So, it's complex. But I always think it's something we have to persevere at and we have to just build it bit by bit by bit.
We had a partnership with the Junior League of Columbia for the past couple of years, where we've been trying to both teach their members about domestic and sexual violence and also hold conversations so they become more willing and more confident in talking about these issues, so they can become ambassadors in a way. And I mean, ambassadors with their friends and families.
We have to talk to young people about what healthy relationships are if we want them to be able to navigate them. If you make a difference in one person's life, then that's a life well lived.
