Helping Women Break the Cycle of Abuse by Partners

Until the night he smashed her car windows, broke into her home and threatened to kill her, Priscilla thought her boyfriend was a reasonable guy.

“We’d been best friends since I was 12, and he was always like my protector,” she said. But when she became pregnant by him at 17, his attention turned menacing.

“He got really jealous, like he didn’t even want me spending time with the baby,” said Priscilla, now 20 and worried enough about her safety that she asked that her last name not be revealed. “I knew that he could be violent, but I didn’t think he would do that to me.”

His late-night attack last May sent Priscilla and her mother searching the Internet for help. They found Break the Cycle, a national group based in Los Angeles aimed at helping teenagers prevent and stop partner abuse.

The group helped Priscilla get a restraining order, taught her to navigate the legal system and counseled her on ways to maintain a safe and healthy relationship with her son’s dad. Now Priscilla is working with Break the Cycle to spread the word to other young women.

With a $15,000 grant from the Los Angeles Times Family Fund of the McCormick Tribune Foundation, Break the Cycle is expanding its “Ending Violence” program, which sends lawyers and counselors into schools, colleges and community centers to teach teens about healthy relationships and the legal means to stop abuse.

Last year, thanks to the generosity of Times readers, the Family Fund spent $1.4 million supporting Southern California charities’ work with disadvantaged families. Its donation helped Break the Cycle reach almost 20,000 teens.

“Typically, a lot of the young people we see have already experienced dating abuse or domestic violence in their families,” said Break the Cycle attorney Jimena Vazquez. Still, the group’s biggest hurdle often is teaching teens to recognize danger.

“A lot of teens don’t understand there’s a lot of abuse besides physical,” she said. “We talk about verbal abuse, sexual abuse.... A lot of time is spent talking about relationships, what they should and shouldn’t be like.”

Like Priscilla, many teenage girls are flattered by a partner’s obsessive attention and surprised when it turns violent.

“So many of them don’t think of jealousy and possessiveness as being part of an abusive relationship,” Vazquez said. “They think it’s normal for their boyfriend not to let them talk to other boys.... They think, ‘Great. He wants to spend all his time with me.’ They don’t recognize that could be a warning sign.”

The group works primarily with girls 12 to 22, an age group at high risk for dating violence. Abuse by a partner is three times as common among teenage girls as among older women, studies show.

Teenage girls often feel locked in unhealthy relationships, either because they are dating someone older and presumably more powerful or because their boyfriends are part of their social circle and breaking up would mean losing friends or status.

Until she enlisted help from Break the Cycle, Priscilla’s boyfriend used his tough-guy demeanor to frighten and intimidate her.

“He would try to overpower me if I didn’t have Jimena [Vazquez], but now he feels overpowered. He backs down,” she said.

Now Priscilla helps counsel other young women -- particularly Latinas like herself -- to recognize and deal with abusive partners.

“Now I notice the things that girls do to keep the drama going, the way they complain, but they keep going back, no matter if the guy is rude or mean or rough,” she said.

“In the Mexican culture, there’s a lot of pressure to stay with your baby’s father. Your parents tell you to get married, to stick with the man.... The ones who’ve been beaten up, those are the ones that hide the most; they feel ashamed. The guys promise them the world and they go back.

“We try to show those girls, there is life after this. You don’t have to put up with it. He is not the only person you can be with.”

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Dec. 19