By Joelle Piercy, LSW, MSS, MLSP
Safe+Sound Somerset Director of Outreach and Community Engagement
Every February, Teen Dating Violence Awareness Month (TDVAM) calls us to look at how young people experience relationships and how we can help keep them safe. At Safe+Sound Somerset, prevention is daily practice rooted in listening to teens, believing them, and responding with education that centers choices, boundaries, and consent.
One of the most powerful tools we use in our teen education programs is an anonymous polling system. During presentations, students can ask questions anonymously in real time. This creates space for honesty without fear of judgment and gives us a rare window into how teens think about relationships, consent, safety, and harm. What we hear matters, and when we pair teens’ real questions with what research tells us, a clearer and more urgent picture emerges.
How Anonymous Questions Change Everything
When teens are given anonymity, the questions shift. They become more specific and vulnerable. Students ask about fear, pressure, confusion, regret, and responsibility, often using language they haven’t yet learned to unpack. They ask things like:
“How do I talk to someone who expects so much from me but gives very little back?”
“What if someone says they’ll kill themselves if you break up with them?”
“What if you were scared to say no?”
These aren’t hypothetical questions. They reflect real dynamics teens are navigating right now. And the data confirms that these experiences are far from rare; 1 in 3 teens in the U.S. will experience physical, sexual, or emotional abuse from a dating partner before adulthood.[1][2] Teens ask these questions because something is already happening.
What Teens Are Trying to Understand: Trends and Patterns
Across hundreds of anonymous questions, several themes come up again and again.
Measuring Harm By Legality
“Is ‘mental abuse’ illegal? Or just physical abuse?”
“At what point does this stuff become illegal?”
“Would I ever really get in trouble for doing any of this?”
We are seeing more students asking whether a behavior is illegal. When these questions are asked out loud, they are often accompanied by a sense of dismissal: If it’s not serious enough to get in trouble, then why does it matter? This mindset is especially concerning given what we know from national data. According to the CDC, nearly 1 in 10 high school students who date experience sexual dating violence in a single year, and about 1 in 12 experience physical dating violence.[3][4] Yet many of these behaviors never result in legal consequences.
The law is designed to respond to the most extreme situations. It is not a measuring stick for whether someone was hurt, scared, pressured, or had their boundaries crossed. When young people learn to ask, “Is this illegal?” before asking “Did this cause harm?”, early warning signs get normalized and dismissed. Prevention means helping teens recognize harm early, and showing them that healthy relationship behaviors are beneficial to them.
Control, Pressure, and Fear
“Is it okay to go to the movies by yourself if your partner thinks you’re with someone else?”
“How can you build up the guts to break up or say no?”
“What if my partner makes me feel bad for having boundaries?”
Teens often ask about jealousy, pressure, and rules that don’t feel right, but aren’t always recognized as abuse. These questions are really about autonomy, or the right to make choices, set boundaries, and give or deny consent without fear of consequences. Studies show that emotional and psychological abuse are among the most common forms of teen dating abuse, and they often appear long before physical violence. Nearly 1 in 4 girls who have dated report being pressured into sexual activity they did not want [2], underscoring how often control and coercion show up in teen relationships.
Consent and Mixed Feelings
“What if someone says yes but later changes their mind?”
“If two people are intoxicated and things happen, is anyone at fault?”
“What if I didn’t know what I was saying yes to?”
Many students express confusion about consent, especially when emotions are complicated or substances are involved. Confusion about what consent or denial of consent looks like is common, and it is imperative that consent education remains a central focus in violence prevention strategies.
Self-Blame and Help-Seeking
“Does the helpline provide support for emotional abuse?”
“How do you think one should handle self-shaming in an abusive situation?”
“Is there a chance I could go on the hotline to figure out the role I’ve been in past relationships?”
Teens also ask whether emotional abuse “counts,” whether it’s okay to ask for help, and how to understand their own role in past relationships. Research shows that only about one-third of teens who experience dating abuse ever tell anyone, and most who do confide in a friend rather than a trusted adult.[2][5] This silence helps explain why spaces where students feel safe to discuss these topics are so critical to prevention.
Relating About Dating: Getting the Conversation Started
Teen Dating Violence Awareness Month is about everyday conversations. Adults play a powerful role in prevention, often simply by how we listen. One of the very first questions a student ever asked us through our anonymous polling system was:
“Why don’t adults take our relationships seriously?”
That question stays with us and guides every part of our teen programming. Even when adults don’t view teen relationships as “serious”, that doesn’t mean that their experiences aren’t real, important, or serious to them. When teens feel dismissed, they are less likely to speak up when something feels wrong. Here are a few ways adults can help at home, in schools, and in the community:
- Believe them: Start from a place of trust. You don’t need to have all the answers to take a teen seriously. Remember that believing them doesn’t mean agreeing with every choice. Believing them means acknowledging their experience and emotions as real.
- Get the Conversation Started and Keep It Open: Instead of leading with rules or warnings, try open-ended questions that invite reflection.
- What’s important to you in a relationship?
- How do you want to feel in a relationship?
- How do you want your parter to feel when they are with you?
- What are some of your relationship boundaries?
These questions help teens build language around choices, boundaries, and consent, and promote skills that support healthy relationships long before harm occurs.
- Be Honest When You Don’t Know Something: It’s OK to say you don’t understand a term or phrase they are using. Asking for clarification models curiosity and helps create a shared language between teens and adults. The vulnerability can also make conversations feel safer and more collaborative.
- Model Respect In Your Own Relationships: Teens are always watching. Even when you think they are not paying attention, they notice how adults communicate, handle conflict, show care, and respect boundaries in their own relationships. Modeling accountability, consent, and respect sends a stronger message than any lecture.
Starting these conversations won’t always be comfortable, and that’s OK. Prevention isn’t about saying everything perfectly; prevention is about showing up, listening, and keeping the door open. When we take teens seriously, when we hear their real questions and respond with care and accountability, we can build a future where young people experience relationships rooted in safety, respect, and choice.
If you or a young person in your life is experiencing dating abuse or sexual violence – or if you’re just not sure and want to talk it through – help is available at Safe+Sound Somerset’s 24/7 Call and Text helpline: 866-685-1122. For more information, or if you are interested in bringing Safe+Sound Somerset’s prevention programs to your school or community, please visit www.safe-sound.org.
Real Answers to Real Questions
Many of the questions teens ask during presentations don’t disappear when the session ends. That’s why we created the Ask Ava podcast, where we answer some of the same real questions we hear from young people every day. Ask Ava extends prevention beyond the classroom in an ongoing conversation. Learn more and listen here: https://safe-sound.org/resource-center/ask-ava/
Reference:
[1] Futures Without Violence. Teen Dating Violence Fact Sheet (2023–2025 update) https://futureswithoutviolence.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/Teen-Dating-Violence-Fact-sheet-3.pdf
[2] Rutgers School of Social Work. Teen Dating Violence Statistics (Fact Sheet). https://socialwork.rutgers.edu/sites/default/files/2022-05/tdv-fact-sheets-statistics.pdf
[3] CDC. Youth Risk Behavior Survey (YRBS) 2021: Dating Violence & Sexual Violence (MMWR Supplement, Apr 28, 2023). https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/72/su/su7201a8.htm
[4] CDC. Teen Dating Violence – Intimate Partner Violence Prevention (overview; YRBS quick stats. https://www.cdc.gov/intimate-partner-violence/about/about-teen-dating-violence.html
[5] New Hampshire Coalition Against Domestic and Sexual Violence (factsheet compiling national sources). Teen Dating Violence Factsheet. https://www.nhcadsv.org/uploads/1/0/7/5/107511883/teen_dating_violence_factsheet_1_.pdf
