Stopping violence at an early age

“Vio­lence of the voice is often only the death rat­tle of rea­son in the throat.”

— John Fred­er­ick Boyes

“The man who strikes first admits that his ideas have given out.”

Chi­nese Proverb

Jen­nifer had fallen in with the wrong crowd. For­merly an above-average stu­dent with no dis­ci­pli­nary prob­lems, she had begun to get in trou­ble at school. Her grades were slip­ping. Fre­quently she did not come home when her par­ents told her to and for long stretches of the day they could not locate her and she would not respond to their phone calls or text messages.

Then she began skip­ping school. Her mother or father would drive her to the front door and watch her go inside, but within an hour they’d have a call from the school office that she was not in the build­ing and had not reported to class. As her behav­ior become more and more unusual they become con­vinced that drug use was the root cause. More wor­ri­some even than that, they had begun to notice marks on her arms and face.

Finally they decided to seek help. They made an appoint­ment for men­tal health and drug and alco­hol eval­u­a­tions and waited until the day before to tell their daugh­ter that the appoint­ments were made and they would pick her up from school. They weren’t ask­ing — she had to go to them. The fol­low­ing day they arrived at school to pick her up but she wasn’t there. She had been present at school all day, to avoid a phone call home, but at the end of the day she had disappeared.

She couldn’t ask her friends to har­bor her because her par­ents would even­tu­ally look for her there. Really, her friends’ homes weren’t the places she wanted to be any­way. But the 24 year-old man in Colum­bus who had been sup­ply­ing her with drugs and tak­ing her to par­ties for months had said that she could come and stay there.

Jen­nifer is not any one sin­gle juve­nile who has been before me in court but rather an amal­ga­ma­tion of cir­cum­stances that are all too com­monly repeated. Barely a week goes by with­out see­ing a young woman who has been taken advan­tage of by an older man, plied with drugs and alco­hol and in many cases, abused emo­tion­ally, phys­i­cally or sex­u­ally. Their cir­cum­stances are not being ignored.

Nation­wide, nearly one in ten teens reports suf­fer­ing abuse at the hands of a boyfriend or girl­friend in the pre­vi­ous year. Two-thirds of those young men and women report that they are too afraid or too embar­rassed to tell their par­ents. Counter to pub­lic expec­ta­tions, stud­ies of mid­dle school stu­dents show that more boys than girls report being the vic­tim of teen violence.

Abuse is not the only dan­ger. Teens are the most likely to be stalked. They are least likely to rec­og­nize and react appro­pri­ately to dan­ger signs. They are the most fre­quent vic­tims of sex­ting and sim­i­lar technology-based offenses.

Since 2010 Con­gress has declared Feb­ru­ary to be ‘Teen Dat­ing Vio­lence Aware­ness and Pre­ven­tion Month.” Gov­er­nor Kasich has signed a procla­ma­tion in Ohio estab­lish­ing the month at a state-wide level as well. Among the agen­cies assist­ing fam­i­lies in Ohio is the Fam­ily Vio­lence Pre­ven­tion Cen­ter, a pro­gram of the Ohio Office of Crim­i­nal Jus­tice Ser­vices. The Cen­ter is led by pro­gram direc­tor Chrys­tal Alexan­der who pre­vi­ously served as the first direc­tor of the Office of Vic­tim Ser­vices in Delaware County.

The Center’s web­site, at ocjs.ohio.gov, is a trea­sure trove of infor­ma­tion for teens, par­ents and fam­i­lies includ­ing the Teen Dat­ing Vio­lence Brochure, the Fam­ily Vio­lence Pre­ven­tion Toolkit and links to dozens of other sites and orga­ni­za­tion that can be of assis­tance. In Delaware County, County Pros­e­cu­tor Carol O’Brien’s Vic­tim Ser­vices Unit is under the direc­tion of Trish Wright and among the many ser­vices it pro­vides it also assists per­sons look­ing to file for pro­tec­tion orders against juveniles.

Through aware­ness, assis­tance and active pre­ven­tion, in the home and at school, progress is being made. You can learn more at teendvmonth.org.

David Hej­manowski is a mag­is­trate and court admin­is­tra­tor of the Delaware County Juve­nile Court and a for­mer assis­tant pros­e­cut­ing attorney.

Posted by Dave Hejmanowski on Feb 24 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Comments can be made below.