Preventing the Pain

It began with pinching, hair pulling and aggressive squeezing. Irene’s 15-year-old boyfriend liked to play a little rough.

Then things got worse, recalled Irene (not her real name). If she bought makeup, he would break it. If she got her nails done, he would break them off. Once when she was trying to do her laundry, he stabbed her in the stomach with a screwdriver.

It was not long before 13-year-old Irene was concealing her multiple bruises and making up stories about how she got a black eye or a busted lip.

“He was very possessive of me,” Irene said. “[He] was my first love and my first everything, and I don’t know where my head was, but I listened to everything he said. I obeyed his rules.”

Irene not only listened to him, but she also protected the boy by hiding the abuse from her family for over a year, a period when she lost most of her friends.

“I went through emotional abuse, physical abuse, verbal abuse--everything there was to hurt me,” she said. “I was too scared to say anything. . . . He would say, ‘I’ll blow up your house if you leave me. I’ll kill you!’ ”

Irene’s relationship provides a graphic case study of what domestic-violence counselors describe as a significant problem. They say teenagers too often find themselves in abusive dating relationships that can result in serious injury--or even death.

“I think it should be a concern that we pay attention to as seriously as when there are adults in this violence,” said Rita Smith, executive director of the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence.

“The more we ignore this behavior and consider it puppy love, the more we make it possible that [the victims] . . . will actually end up dead.”

Some health classes in Southern California high schools cover the subject of violence in the home and in romance, and some counseling centers offer information and help for teenagers. Overall, however, abuse is still a subject that teenagers talk about only among themselves.

That reticence has prompted centers for battered women to set up programs in which teens who have been abused speak at high schools, clubs and community centers. Some centers also offer counseling.

One such project is through Interval House Crisis Shelters and Centers for Domestic Violence, which serves Orange County and Long Beach. It sponsors programs in which teens with first-hand knowledge of abuse put on skits for the other kids and staff a 24-hour advice hot line.

“These kids now have other teens they can relate to and talk to because they have similar experiences,” said Janine Limas, community education director at Interval House. “They can offer solutions.”

Many of the teens in counseling at Interval House have grown up in abusive homes, Limas said. Their mothers often are focused on avoiding confrontation with their batterers, she said, and don’t notice what their daughters are going through.

“It’s handed down from generation to generation,” she said.

Boys, for their part, may feel that abuse of women by men is acceptable.

Because of underreporting of abuse incidents, experts say, the public is not well aware of the problem and statistics don’t fully reflect its extent.

Some surveys indicate that violence occurs in 25% to 30% of teen dating relationships, said Smith of the National Coalition.

This problem can begin as young as age 12, and in 95% of reported cases, girls are the victims, according to Break the Cycle, a nonprofit organization that offers counseling and legal assistance to teenagers in abusive relationships.

In 1997, about 30% of 3,466 female homicide victims, including some teenagers, were killed by their current or former male partners, according to FBI crime statistics.

Nationally, about 6% of female murder victims, ages 17 or younger, were killed by partners in an intimate relationship, according to a U.S. Justice Department report, based on FBI figures from 1976 to 1996. For male murder victims, the figure was less than 1%.

Among women who have experienced violence in intimate relationships, the report said, women ages 16-19 suffered among the highest rates of violence.

Domestic violence occurs in every race and culture, said Carolee Newman, executive director of Valley Women’s Center in Tarzana. “The important thing to know is that it transcends socioeconomic boundaries as well.”

Abuse occurs just as frequently in homosexual relationships as in heterosexual, according to Smith of the National Coalition, but these situations are reported even less often because in many cases the teenagers would also have to disclose that they are homosexual.

Confiding in Peers

Most teenagers in abusive relationships have not talked to any adult about the physical or emotional abuse and confide only in their fellow teens, says the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence.

‘It is a very large problem. I think it’s even a bigger problem than we know about,” said Shirley Gellatly, community education director at Human Options, which serves Orange County from a walk-in center in Costa Mesa and offers shelter to battered women, transitional housing and other resources.

In what is typically their first serious relationship, teenagers can have difficulty comprehending what behaviors constitute abuse, particularly if they have seen them accepted in their own homes.

“If the child has grown up in a home where there is family violence, then the child will not recognize and may think that the violence going on in their teenage relationship is normal,’ Gellatly said.

One study found that more than 51% of students who witnessed abuse in their parents’ lives became involved in abusive relationships themselves.

What’s more, jealousy and possessive behavior can be confused as a sign of love and affection in some cases, said Tanya Koenig of the Los Angeles Commission on Assaults Against Women. Such controlling behavior often results in isolating the victims from their friends and family and frequently can escalate into violence.

A young woman named Elia, who now volunteers at Interval House, was in an abusive relationship for 2 1/2 years. Her boyfriend was jealous and controlling; he told her what to wear and tried to cut her off from her friends. He threatened to kill himself if she ever left him.

Irene’s boyfriend also exhibited possessive behavior about two months into their relationship. He would get angry if she did her laundry because he thought that if she looked nice, she would attract other men, Irene recalled. When she slept, he would cut her hair. If the telephone rang, he would pick it up and throw it because he did not like her getting phone calls while he was with her.

This abuse mirrors that in troubled adult relationships in key ways, said Deborah Kass, deputy in charge of the East Lake Juvenile Division for the L.A. district attorney’s office.

“It runs the gamut from punching each other out to using some kind of weapon,” she said. “And the victims have the tendency to recant, just like adults do.”

One of the most dangerous times is when the victim tries to break up with the abuser, said Carolee Newman, executive director of Valley Women’s Center. This fear and secrecy make it difficult to get help to those in such relationships before violence escalates and someone is killed, Newman said.

Victim’s Friends Knew of Her Fears

The stories that come to light and capture public attention are often some of the most extreme and most tragic. One shocked the public two years ago when 21-year-old Khoa Truc ‘Robert’ Dang returned to his former Norwalk high school and killed his ex-girlfriend, 16-year-old Catherine Tran, and then committed suicide. She had just ended a long relationship with Dang. Her friends described Dang as excessively possessive and said she feared his temper and violent side.

In June 1997, 18-year-old Charles Salas, a member of the 18th Street Gang, arrived at the home of an ex-girlfriend who had broken up with him two weeks earlier. He accused her of seeing other people, shot her in the head and fled. He then committed suicide.

In these cases, the abusers were only a few years older than their victims, but it is not unusual to see teens dating adults who are 10 or more years older, said Susan Powers, assistant head deputy for the district attorney’s sex crimes unit.

Sexual relations with a minor can be “a really serious, predatory kind of crime in many circumstances,” said Powers. “It can start as just coercive behavior, demanding that the teen be certain places, do certain things. When that doesn’t happen it can result in physical violence.”

The adults in those situations can be immature, with low thresholds of anger that can erupt in violence, Powers said.

“Some of the violence can be really horrific,” Powers said. In one such case, a 27-year-old man who had fathered 11 babies by different teenagers abused the girls by hitting them with a cane and locking them in rooms. He beat one pregnant girl so badly that she gave birth prematurely, Powers said.

Many high school students have seen their friends in such relationships. Their chums are often not only witnesses but also their friends’ confidants.

Ruby Martinez, 15, listened to a lecture at Los Angeles High School on abusive relationships and recalled seeing many of her girlfriends in such relationships with older men.

“Since they’re bigger, [the boyfriends] . . . think that they own them,” Ruby said. “I have friends who are scared.”

Nick Diaz has seen a friend strike a girl.

“I’ve seen him grab her and actually hit her. I saw him smack her once,” Diaz said. “I told him he should stop doing that.”

Another of Diaz’s friends has had a restraining order filed against him.

Venice High senior Nereida Vital has also seen the abuse in a friend’s relationship with a possessive boyfriend.

“He’d get mad if she [went] . . . out with me,” said Vital. “If she wanted to sleep over at my house, she got really scared that he’d come look for her.”

Last month the friend finally broke up with the abuser.

Teaching Teenagers

Irene also confided only in her peers. When her family saw her with bruises or a bloody lip, she would tell them that a gang had jumped her. Her boyfriend backed up such stories and even said that he tried to jump in and break up the fight. When he broke her nose the first time, she tried to hide the injury from her father.

Kami, 17, also confided solely in her friends, until her boyfriend told her she was not allowed to talk to them. He also began pinching her and pulling her hair.

“If he told me to get something and I didn’t get it, he’d just pinch me,” said Kami (not her real name). It wasn’t long until he was punching her in the leg and in the arm and then in the face.

When she got pregnant, though, he eased up: he punched her only in the arm and pulled her hair.

Outreach programs throughout Southern California try to teach teenagers like Irene and Kami that controlling and violent behavior is not normal or acceptable.

Many of these programs bring speakers to high schools and middle schools to intervene as early as possible--to stop abusive relationships before they start.

An Assembly measure, AB 558, is being considered in Sacramento to require that domestic-violence issues be included in public school health classes.

Its goal is to reach children at an early age and let them know that domestic violence should not be the norm, said Janice Rocco, chief of staff to Assemblywoman Hannah-Beth Jackson (D-Santa Barbara).

Meanwhile, many students are relying on independent programs that offer counseling and assistance for teens. In many cases, these programs are developed at centers that already deal with adult domestic violence.

For the past year, the Department of Health Services has been studying teen-relationship abuse, services available to teens and whether centers are equipped to help teens, said Carol L. Motylewski-Link, chief of the department. The study is due to wind up by the end of the year.

In the San Fernando Valley, the Valley Women’s Center has been offering services for teens and doing outreach to schools since 1995.

“We don’t want to just define the problem,” Newman said. “We want them to feel that there is hope, that other people have gotten out of it and there is help.”

The center offers counseling and support groups for teens, both for victims and abusers, who are more likely to respond to this treatment at a younger age, Newman said.

Another organization, Break the Cycle, focuses solely on teens; it provides an education program that includes information on how the law can punish abusive behavior.

The organization sends representatives to high schools, middle schools, juvenile detention facilities and boys’ and girls’ clubs, where they tell about the different types of abuse and list the warning signs of unhealthy relationships.

They also provide counseling and even lawyers to assist in getting a judge to order a restraining order against an abuser.

“We’re teaching kids that it’s not just a bad thing that’s hurtful but also illegal and that crimes have consequences,’ said Meredith Blake, executive director of Break the Cycle.

For the first six months of this year, Break the Cycle received 197 requests from victims or their friends for legal counsel or representation, said Jessica Aronoff, program director of legal services.

Kami got a restraining order against a boyfriend who bit her lip so badly it was swollen for two days. She is planning on renewing the order when necessary, “just to be on the safe side, in case he gets drunk or on drugs and decides to come back for revenge.”

Irene never got a restraining order against her boyfriend. She went back to him twice after he broke her nose, and each time, he broke it again.

Finally, she decided to split for good, and she is now receiving counseling. Despite the beatings, she says she isn’t worried about his coming after her; she has never made a police report.

“I don’t want to snitch him out,” she said. “I wasn’t raised to be a snitch.”