By Bridget Murray
Monitor staff
Arising surge of violence is knocking the innocence out of teen dating and spurring psychologists to examine how teens can build healthier relationships.

Young people have lost touch with what really constitutes a relationship, like caring, sharing, trust and respect, psychologists say. Instead they tend to be demanding and disrespectful of dating partners.

A 1991 University of North Carolina survey of 32 colleges provides a glimpse into the problem: Survey results peg the rate of college-age dating violence between 32 percent and 37 percent in heterosexual relationships. Surprisingly, at the college level, perpetrators are often women, new research has found.

When it comes to adolescent relationships, however, boys are more often the abusers. A study of predictors of dating violence among more than 600 high school students conducted by social worker Libby Bergman in Minneapolis in the late 1980s found that 25 percent of girls and 10 percent of boys reported being victims of severe dating violence.

A lack of values

'Families are failing to tell kids how to build strong relationships and live principled lives,' said Wolfe.

'Instead, kids of the '90s are learning to aim for personal success and individual gain.'

The lack of values is especially true of children who've grown up in broken, hostile or violent homes. Many have seen destructive relationships but few displays of character or caring, says Wolfe. They learn to survive by trying to beat the system.

Some high school girls are so desperate for a boyfriend that they'll keep him around even if he's abusive, he noted.

Interventions that work

Wolfe believes that gender stereotypes-such as the idea that women should clean house while men work-lead to abuse against women, but that such mindsets can be changed in adolescence.

With many parents shunting the character-education responsibility to the rest of society, it's up to schools and the community to teach children about their power to make principled choices, Wolfe said.

He and his colleagues have developed an early intervention program, the Youth Relationships Project, to dispel gender myths and promote egalitarian relationships among high school students.

'The idea behind the project is to help teens form healthy relationships, teach them not to think in stereotypes and teach girls self-assertiveness,' Wolfe said.

Funded by the Canadian government and active in six Ontario communities, the project serves 14- to 16-year-olds who are at risk for behaving violently in relationships. Such adolescents tend to have witnessed or experienced violence in their homes.

This past year, an 18-session program was run in Strathroy District Collegiate Institute and Thames Secondary School. Both are high schools in Middlesex County, Ontario.

'We don't teach-we involve the students,' said Thames' program co-facilitator Carolyn Grasley, a doctoral candidate in clinical psychology at the University of Western Ontario.

Sessions start with discussion and information exchange and end with role-playing, activities and interaction with the program facilitators.

Topics focus on the way some men misuse their social and personal power and on sexist and misogynistic advertisements, books and movies, and prompt discussion on power relationships, nonviolent communication, unlearning violence, responsibility in dating and getting help for abuse.

Kids who see a lot of violence don't know what healthy nonviolent relationships look like: They just see men as potential perpetrators and women as victims, Grasley noted.

'We urge kids to recognize violence and make their own decisions about it instead of blindly repeating what they've seen others do,' said Grasley.

The first five sessions are most critical because they expose kids to a new way of thinking. 'By the end of the program, most kids can apply the knowledge to their own lives,' said Wolfe.

The program has been pilot-tested on 120 teens over the past two years; another 120 will participate in a formal test this fall. Surveys show that the program gets immediate results-boys say they stop being as violent and girls say they put up with less abuse.

Some versions of the program are run through Children's Protective Services, while some are incorporated into health or family classes in public schools. At Thames, Principal Linda Crossley found that the program was so successful with the 18 ninth-graders who participated last year, she's running it with all freshmen this school year.

Broad-based prevention

Such reports prompted the study's authors, psychologists Peter Jaffe, PhD, and Marlies Sudermann, PhD, to develop a school-based antiviolence program, known as ASAP, for Canada's high schools.

To kick off ASAP, schools bring in teams of professionals to deliver the antiviolence message to teens. Students listen to violence experts and victims, then break up into small groups to discuss what they learned. The 'teams of professionals'-usually comprised of psychologists, social workers and administrators from local battered women's shelters-then work with teachers on guiding the discussions.

In their groups, students also work together on miniprojects such as analyzing song lyrics for references to violence and rewriting them to be less brutal.

The program also encourages teachers to weave antiviolence messages into their instruction. For instance, an English teacher could teach conflict resolution skills by getting kids to think up alternative ways to end a story with a bloody conclusion, says Bill Tucker, principal of Sir Winston Churchill Elementary School, also in London.

Jaffe started testing preliminary versions of ASAP in the early 1980s, and it has since been adopted by most of the public schools in London. In a study of 737 London students who were in ninth- through 13th-grade that was published in 1992, Jaffe found that ASAP significantly raised their awareness of violence in their own family and in their dating relationships.

Now Jaffe and his colleagues at the London Family Court Clinic have distributed the manual form of the ASAP program to all Canadian English-language school boards and they've conducted antiviolence workshops across Canada.

Jaffe hopes to see versions of ASAP or similar programs at work in all of the schools in Canada.

'Kids need to realize that there are more positive ways to resolve conflict and anger than being controlling and aggressive,' Jaffe said.