Using a model emphasizing community collaboration, grant recipients provide teen dating violence prevention education and training opportunities, implement policies and procedures addressing all aspects of teen dating violence, and provide on-site support services to survivors and intervention services to adolescent perpetrators of dating violence. Although abuse occurs most often in a home, the location where physical abuse is most often reported is in the schools. It is clear that dating violence is prevalent among adolescents, and that it can have severe and long-lasting social, psychological, and physical health repercussions for teen victims. There is a pressing need for prevention and intervention with adolescents, and adolescence is a critical time to do so. Because dating is relatively new to adolescents, they are less likely to be entrenched in patterns of behavior, and more open to changing attitudes and behaviors, giving educators a unique opportunity to provide preventive education around teen dating violence, and to offer safe intervention strategies within the school.
Domestic violence is a pattern of coercive control one person exercises over another.
Domestic violence is the actual or threatened physical, sexual, psychological or economic abuse of an individual by someone with whom they have or have had an intimate relationship. Teen dating violence mirrors adult domestic violence in terms of it existing on a continuum of controlling behaviors. These behaviors range from verbal and emotional abuse, to physical assault, to murder and rape. In addition, teen dating violence is seen by some as a stage in the intergenerational cycle of violence, linking witnessing or experiencing violence during childhood to perpetrating or experiencing intimate violence in adulthood. Abusive teen dating relationships, similar to adult domestic violence, generally exhibit a pattern.