…to gain greater understanding around the theme of teenage relationship abuse at the national working group this week, convened by Dr Ruth Weir of City St George’s, University of London.
🤩 Katy Barrow-Grint told us about work her team are doing to develop the evidence base for risk assessments in teenage relationship abuse, addressing key national evidence gaps
🤩 Hannah Guy shared the research she is doing into tech-facilitated violence against women and girls, with a focus on pinpointing how harmful behaviour escalates and therefore where we need to be able to intervene
🤩 Justine Dodds gave an update on a development of Respect UK‘s dating detox programme wherein they are testing how their teenage relationship harm programme could be woven into sports delivery as a way of engaging a wider pool of young people
🤩 Ruth referenced a piece of research into trends in teenage relationship abuse prevalence in Wales which has flagged that 1/3 of pupils report experiencing harm, using harm or a combination of the two
The key takeaways from all of these fascinating talks were absolutely in line with the work we have been developing at Changing Relations over the last few years:
💡 It is absolutely critical that we pay attention to normalised, everyday behaviours rather than dismissing them as banter or just “low level” – this is the point at which we can make a crucial difference before harmful behaviour becomes more entrenched
💡 Prevention work needs to happen much earlier with young people – making sure we create an opportunity to model healthy relationship behaviours even before young people are thinking about intimate partner relationships – we can do this in relation to friendship, helping young people to understand the kinds of relationship behaviours that make them feel good or bad
Image credit: Tamsin Rees featuring the art classroom from Ayesha’s story within our Sometimes it Hurts story series.
