Two in Five girls nationwide get abused by their partner. This ratio is too high. Relationship abuse needs to stop, it’s unacceptable. This topic not only affects the victim but affects everyone around them.

To begin, most people do not realize they are in an abusive relationship. Most teens think it’s their fault or that it’s just a onetime thing if their partner hits them and so on. In reality it’s not, once a teen lets it happen the abuser gains control. After they gain control everything escalates very quickly, including physical and emotional abuse. Emotional abuse isn’t a big deal, right? Wrong, emotional abuse can affect someone as affectively as physical abuse does. Emotional abuse involves everything from insults to even threats. It makes the victim feel worthless, which is not good. After a child starts to become worthless the family starts to notice. This is when it starts affecting the whole family. Parents start to become worried and start realizing something’s wrong, but don’t know what it is. Most people cannot see the difference between a healthy relationship and an abusive one. This is a huge problem, because the victim in an abusive relationship will want you to notice but not want to come out and verbally tell you. Signs of an unhealthy relationship are usually that one person is dominating over the other, and the couple starts to become isolated from friends and family.

A lot of people think that rape is only done by strangers, but they’re wrong. Date rape is very common among teens. The sex is forced onto the teens and they don’t know how to say no. Another factor is that they actually are afraid to say no because they’re a part of an abusive relationship and are afraid of getting hit or even worse. This then leads to sex being a regular or very common thing in that relationship because it replaces the hitting or more violent things.

Most people think that all abusive relationships involve a “built” man who is addicted to drugs or alcohol you beats a young “beautiful” girl. As this very well could be a scenario, there are so many more possibilities out there. For example, it’s actually not always the female who gets abused. Males get abused almost as often as women do. The ratings don’t show this though because males are too embarrassed to come out and say they’ve been abused because of the tough man stereotype that has been forced upon on men. It also happens among homosexual relationships. Most relationships don’t even involve drugs or alcohol.

To start us off, saying that abusive relationships don’t have anything to do with alcohol or drugs is false. But again there are a various amount of situations. Drugs and alcohol do play roles in some relationships but not all. For example, if a child didn’t have a good example of parenting as a child it can lead to them being abusive as a teen. If a child grew up being abused by a parent, then they think it’s acceptable as a teen and adult to abuse another being. Since they have never been taught that this is wrong they can’t help it when they lash out.
When a teen gets involved in an abusive relationship at a young age it stays with them forever. This is saying, that once a teen has one abusive relationship they either keep going back to that same person or keep finding new abusive relationships. A teen now feels like they’ve lost a part of themselves and goes searching for it through new relationships. But it’s now a habit for them to find a more aggressive partner who is most likely abusive. Once they start to be in more and more abusive relationships they start to get used to it. This is a very bad thing. Teens shouldn’t be in unhealthy relationships, they need stable healthy ones so they know how to set up their future.

After teens finally get out of abusive relationships they have a lot of work to do! A teen can go into post-traumatic stress for a long time. They can also go into depression. They suddenly have a “piece” of them missing with the abuser. This “piece” is mostly all confidence and trust. When they were in the relationship their confidence got lower and lower. Now they have to build it all the way back up again from rock bottom. They also now have very big trust issues. The person they thought they might love ended up betraying or violating them. They feel like nobody is trustable, which is not true. This makes the whole recovery process even harder because the people that they should be trusting to help them, they are pushing away. These two characteristics are very hard to recover from after they’ve been broken.

To conclude, abusive relationships are hard to stop and recover from. So they shouldn’t even begin in the first place. If people could be raised and taught well from the beginning these catastrophes could be prevented. Teens also need to learn how to say no and have confidence. If people learn these things from the beginning are percentage of abusive relationships would most likely decrease!