One-in-three adolescents in the United States is a victim of abuse at the hands of an intimate partner. This isn’t just kids being kids. This is people who are coming of age accepting abuse as normal, paving the way for a lifetime of danger. But before we can see a change, we need to see a problem. And because teen dating violence has been so normalized, we really need to start at the basics.

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Despite progress in raising awareness of sexual violence, there are still those who attempt to lay people’s trauma on a spectrum with one end being “shut up, it’s not that bad” and the other end being “legitimate rape.” All this ends up doing is denying the pain of survivors. Here are four important things we need to do in order to abandon perpetrator logic.

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In his spoken word poem “Action,” Guante reflects on how he should have held his friend accountable for the abusive way he spoke about and treated his girlfriend. He analyzes how the media teaches men to think of sex as violence and to victim blame. This poem asks men to speak up and reminds them that rape culture is dependent on their silence and complacency.

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( Trigger Warning) Domestic violence, dating violence, relationship violence — it’s not something we like or know how to talk about. Or perhaps more accurately, it’s not something we know how to talk about, especially when it’s happening to someone we love. But it’s important we learn how to talk about it in ways that actually help them, which is far more difficult than you may think.

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Unhappy person lying lon a couch; their partner is frustrated in the background

There are a lot of reasons why folks are up-in-arms about “50 Shades of Grey.” Here are ten ways that the book (and their subsequent film) shows clear signs of abuse – especially emotional abuse, which can be harder to pinpoint if you’re not sure which red flags to pay attention to. Use this article as a guide for thinking through the relationship in “50 Shades.”

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