Dating abuse all too common among teens

MOSES LAKE — One in three teens will experience some kind of abuse in a dating relationship.

It doesn’t have to be just hitting, according to Jenny Moeller, the executive director of Create Your Statement, a Spokane-based organization she founded to help teens deal with dating abuse. It can be constant belittling, demands for sex, and psychological manipulation.

“It’s only centered on power and control,” she said.

And it isn’t just men who abuse either, Moeller said. More and more girls are crossing lines and becoming more violent as well, and one in ten men will experience some kind of abuse in a dating or romantic relationship.

“Dating abuse happens slowly,” said Moeller. “You don’t understand that you are in hot water until you are in hot water.”

Moeller spoke last Thursday at the Columbia Basin Technical Skills Center to an audience of mainly high school and middle school girls, telling them that are not defined by their love lives. The event was sponsored by the Moses Lake Soroptomists.

There are three stages to the cycle of abuse in intimate relationships, Moeller said: tension, in which one partner fears anything can wrong; explosion, in which something does and the repentance/honeymoon stage, in which the abusive partner apologizes profusely.

“True love is a behavior, not a feeling,” she said.

Create Your Statement offers courses for teens and young adults — including separate programs for young men and women — to help kids see the signs of abuse in their own relationships and others, to prevent themselves from getting into abusive situations and to learn how to break up without causing problems.

“I want youth to have clear boundaries and know how to set them,” she said.

Moeller speaks from a deep experience. She said she was the kind of high school girl who didn’t have any boundaries, always needed a boyfriend and thought she had “magic girlfriend dust” that could fix bad boys. Because of this, Moeller said she ended up in a series of abusive relationships that nearly pushed her to suicide.

“It was shocking to me. I had such great family and friends and I found myself in a dark place,” she said. “I needed a boyfriend to be complete. To measure up. To be relevant. I didn’t know my value.”

She was afraid to speak up because she thought she could fix everything, Moeller said.

“Don’t be ashamed to speak up,” she said.

Lilly Thorneberry, a Moses Lake High School sophomore and member of the Teen Leadership Council, said she is working with New Hope in Moses Lake to help teenagers find ways out of abusive relationships.

“As a high school student, I walk in high school hallways and see unhealthy relationships every day and it’s really not okay,” she said.

Charles H. Featherstone can be reached via email at countygvt@columbiabasinherald.com