COLUMN, "LOVE OR ABUSE," BY LENORE SKENAZY, DSLSTART.VERIZON.NET (10/01/07)
 
Joan Graham had her first baby at age 16. By the time she was 21, she'd had two more and was up to her ears in diapers, runny noses and tears - including her own. She loved her boyfriend deeply, desperately, but he hit and kicked her and wouldn't stop. What could she do?

It was the boyfriend himself came up with a solution. "He told me that he knew I really loved him," says Joan, "but the only way for us to stay together and everything to be okay was for me to have a lot more children with him."

More children? A lot? At that instant, says Joan, something clicked:

"He doesn't love me."

She began plotting her escape.

Until now, no one has really examined the link between young girls getting knocked around and knocked up. But a new study by Dr. Elizabeth Miller at the University of California, Davis, just did, and the results are as infuriating as they are irrefutable: Fully one quarter of the teens in abusive relationships whom she interviewed admitted that their boyfriends were actively trying to get them pregnant.

Some were flushing the girls' birth control pills down the toilet, or poking holes in their condoms. Others were removing their condoms during sex or refusing to use them at all. Some, however, were simply doing what Joan's boyfriend did: Sweet talking the girls with promises of love forever -- "If you give me a baby."

Can sweet talk really be considered abuse?

"This controlling, coercive stuff gets very murky," Dr. Miller admits, "because a girl thinks, 'His wanting me to have his baby means that he really cares about me.' It gets very, very confusing for a young woman."

It certainly does. But it also seems obvious that saddling a girl with a pregnancy she doesn't want is really the ultimate abuse.

A teen who's pregnant has such a higher chance of dropping out of school, of being thrown out of her home, of ending up impoverished. If that isn't as crippling as a kick to the kidneys, what is?

Which is not to say that some girls dying to hold onto their boyfriends don't try to get pregnant in hopes of hog-tying him. "It's very complex," says Dr. Miller.

So is the solution. Still, it seems clear where it must begin, which is by teaching teens, male and female, what a healthy relationship actually consists of.

"One of the things we've found is that if you ask young women , 'Have you been abused?' we get much lower numbers than if you ask specific things like were they being hit or slapped or forced to have sex," says Vicki Breitbart, a vice president at Planned Parenthood of New York City.

This means that some girls getting beaten and raped don't even realize this is "abuse." It just seems normal, as it must seem normal when the boy who slaps them and screams at them also wants to make a beautiful baby and promises everything will be fine.

As Joan realized after believing this three times: It won't.

The sooner all girls realize this, the better.

NOTE: Any young person who feels that she (or he) may be in an abusive relationship can call the National Teen Dating Abuse Hotline toll free at 1-866-331-9474 for counseling, support or even a safety plan. Or they can visit loveisrespect.org.