From YouTube - 1 IN 3 Teenagers is Abused in a Relationship:

Dating abuse is a serious issue. 1 in 3 teens is abused in a relationship. Let's fight to stop youth dating abuse. Join DoSomething.org's 1 in 3 Campaign to make a statement, stop the abuse and keep teenagers safe.

RELATED : The New York Times published an article titled, "Teenage Girls Stand By Their Man", in which a group of teenagers was asked what they thought about the 20 yr-old pop singer Rihanna taking back her 19 yr-old boyfriend after he beat her so badly he left her with a bloddied face :

Even after they saw a photo of Rihanna’s bloodied, bruised face, which had raced across the Internet, they still defended Mr. Brown. “She probably made him mad for him to react like that,” the other ninth grader said. “You know, like, bring it on?”

The girls agreed that Mr. Brown overreacted. According to court documents, the fight last month erupted after Rihanna read a text message to Mr. Brown from another woman. Mr. Brown, the affidavit said, then punched, bit and choked her.

Should he be punished? No, said the girls, whose names were withheld at the request of the school. After all, they said, Rihanna seemed to have reconciled with Mr. Brown.

“So he shouldn’t get into trouble if she doesn’t feel that way,” one girl said. “She probably feels bad that it was her fault, so she took him back.”

Her friend nodded. “I don’t think he’ll hit her like that again,” she said.

There is something utterly wrong in how "equality" has been ingrained in our kids that teenage girls will say that Rihanna not just probably asked for it, but deserved it as well.

Here's the deal though : We've been telling our kids that girls are equal to boys biologically. That if girls really try they can beat any guy at any sport, blah blah blah. I mean, look at the hot mess of the TV wrestling world to see how "equality" is sold to the masses.

Yet the bottom line is that it is not true. Although there are physical differences between males, the physical differences between males and females are even bigger. It doesn't matter if Chris is one year younger than Rihanna. He obviously could drive a car AND bludgeon Rihanna at the same time. And if you haven't noticed, the woman is also a bit taller than him and everything. Yet she doesn't have the muscle mass nor the force to protect herself from this guy.

Yet, there's even a more important point : LOVER ARE NOT ABUSERS.

Period.

If a lover puts a hand on you to smack you down, that person doesn't love. That person is using sex and empathy to control you and abuse you. And it is not that this person is all powerful. It means you've got to step back and question, why am I allowing this person to beat me like this. We still have not as a society created social practices or tools that victims of abuse can call upon to get themselves out of these situations.

Take the example of alcohol comsumption.

The idea of a designated driver was pioneered by Harvard School of Public Health's Center for Health Communication more than 20 years ago and eight years after the founding of Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD). The whole idea of the designated driver is so strong and so ingrained in our culture that even alcoholic beverage companies have run with the moniker and created their own campaigns. DesignatedDriver.com is a site paid for by beer companies and if you look at the first page of Google Search results, neither Hardvard nor MADD are to be found on the top 10

I may be just ignorant of any similar campaigns, but I know of no similar successful meme around dating abuse.

We need a meme, a whole set of cultural practices that would at least create the foundational infrastructure for potential abuse victims to find the help they need. It may be teaching our kids the value of a "Lover's Contract", where they promise to each other to love and cherish, not to hurt and abuse. It may be a "designated adult", a person who they can go to talk about their boyfriends or girlfriends that is not necessarily their parents or school personnel. It may be a "Love Ring" or some other form of visual cue that signals they're in an "abuse-free" relationship.

I honestly don't know what it would be. Yet I have to tell you this : I've always thought that schools are hideous places for children and especially teenagers to be 7 hours a day cloistered with other kids and only school personnel. Schools are harmful to kids because they are meant to engineer worker drones, they are not meant to be spaces for kids to express themselves fully --with all the good and bad-- and to find the potential and the limits of their forms of expressions.

Schools also segregate children from their parents. They were fashioned and modeled after low-security prison and mental wards of the 19th century because they were created to contain the unwashed masses' children while they were away working at sweathshops. The upper classes in this country didn't send their kids to regular schools until well into 20th century. If you read US writers like Mark Twain, Henry James or Edit Wharton, you'll understand why the upper classes educated their kids at home until it was time for them to send them away to preparatory colleges or universities around the time they became teenagers. If you want to learn more about the development of the US public school system, you have to get SCHOOL: The Story Of The American Public School System, produced by PBS. It's will truly open your eyes about what schools are meant to be.

All this to say that schools are places that mostly hinder children and teenagers emotional and social development; leading to teenagers who'll say, "Rihanna deserved the beating". As many homeschooling parents like to say, schools are places where kids end up educating kids --the teachers are basically there for damage control. Yes, it's a dramatic and, for most teachers, unfair statement. Yet in the end, when it comes to basic social and emotional skills, schools are indeed like Lord of the Flies.

I don't see anytime soon a major overhaul of the educational spaces and institutions in which we pen our children and deny them the space they need to learn to negotiate and seek help with issues like dating abuse. Which is why we need to find a successful meme like the idea of a "designated driver" to make physical, sexual and verbal abuse unnacceptable and, dare I say, "uncool" for teenagers and young adults.

And let me tell, the thought of having to find a successful meme to make abuse "uncool" makes my stomach turn.

[ Nota Bene : The video was produced by Do Something. I found it atOh No They Didn't. ]