‘I loved him. It was quite abusive, like young abuse’: troubling girls’ experiences of domestic violence and abuse while at school

Although largely defined and located as an adult issue, there is increased responsiveness to the fact that girls as young as 13 (Barter et al, 2009) are subjected to similar levels of violence and abuse in relationships to adult women, with comparable, if not greater deleterious effects. However, little is known about how young people understand and make sense of these experiences. This article presents findings from a study exploring girls’ understandings and experiences of violence and abuse in their teen relationships, while at school, through in-depth narrative interviews. The accounts demonstrate how the girls are confined and outmanoeuvred by culturally dominant heteronormative discourses of ‘relationships’ and ‘love’, thereby hindering their attempts to understand, make sense of, and identify their experiences as violent and abusive. The findings provide a nuanced understanding of the complexity, contradictions and acceptance of violence and abuse in young relationships: establishing the urgent need to reimagine heteronormative frameworks that hijack and normalise gendered discourses and render love, violence and abuse as concomitant. Young people need ways to critically explore dominant discourse in school contexts beyond the relationships and sex education curriculum and for relational violence to be reimagined within collaborative educational spaces.