More than 40,000 teens between 15 and 17 experienced teen dating violence between 2009 and 2022, a new report from Statistics Canada says.
“Teen dating violence is a pressing problem in Canada, but national data on its scope and associated characteristics are scarce,” says the report, released Wednesday.
Canada has little data about teen dating violence, says Deinera Exner-Cortens, an associate professor at the University of Calgary and scientific co-director at PREVNet, a national organization that promotes healthy relationships among children and youth. There is no data about dating violence for pre-teens, she says.
But dating violence appears to be increasing. According to crime reports analyzed by Statistics Canada, rates of dating violence rose 33 per cent between 2015 and 2022. Rates had dropped 22 per cent between 2009 and 2014.
Statistics Canada’s report examined data from two sources. The 2018 Survey of Safety in Public and Private Spaces relies on self-reported incidents of dating violence, including physical and sexual assault and emotional and psychological abuse, experienced by a teenager and committed by the person they were dating. The abuse did not need to meet a criminal threshold to be included in this survey.
Researchers also used the Uniform Crime Reported Surveys which includes only incidents reported to police and determined to be criminal. Many violent acts are not reported to police, so considering self-reported incidents as well as official crime reports gives a clearer picture of teen dating violence, the report says.
That picture is grim.
In 2022, most police-reported incidents of dating violence were sexual, with girls experiencing sexual dating violence more often than boys. This included being forced to perform sex acts they did not want or having their partner force or attempt to force them to have sex.
Also in 2022, nearly two-thirds of victims of dating violence had physical force used against them. Eleven per cent of incidents involved a weapon.
In general, charges were more likely to be laid when the victim of dating violence was a girl. In 2022, charges were laid in 83 per cent of teen dating violence cases.
Difficult to define
Dating violence also occurred online, often involving sharing, or threatening to share, sexually explicit images. Legal experts disagree over how laws about child pornography apply to youth who store or share sexually explicit images, Canadian Affairs has previously reported.
Dating violence can be difficult to define because dating relationships, especially among teens, are different from other romantic relationships. They are often shorter with less commitment, says Chelsey Lee, who is obtaining a PhD in criminology at Simon Fraser University.
Teens are “generally navigating typical adolescent development factors too, in terms of relationships and their sense of self and self-esteem and values,” said Lee, who studied the effectiveness of teen dating violence prevention programs for her master’s degree.
In 2021, Exner-Cortens of the University of Calgary co-authored a study that found one in three Canadian teenagers in a dating relationship experienced some form of violence in that relationship.
That matters because teen dating violence “can kick off a cycle of victimization in adulthood,” Exner-Cortens said.
Exner-Cortens has delivered school-based programs about healthy relationships for eight years. Over that time, she said she has seen more teenage boys expressing misogynist views. Exner-Cortens says it is impossible to determine what caused this, but believes teenagers spending more time online — especially during the pandemic — may be one factor.
Many teenagers were lonely and used social media to find community, she says. But the algorithms of those sites often sent teenagers — particularly boys — to videos that expressed harmful views of women.
The easy accessibility of violent pornography is also a factor. “Pornography access is easier now,” she said.
‘No impact’
According to Statistics Canada’s report, 10 per cent of dating violence incidents happen on school property. But most — 69 per cent — of incidents happen on private property, with girls most likely to be victims of violence in private spaces and boys more likely to be victims in public spaces.
While schools can be the site of teen dating violence, they are also where many teen dating violence prevention programs occur.
Teenagers want to know what healthy relationships look like, says Rachel MacLean, manager at the Canadian Public Health Association in Ottawa, a national non-governmental organization focused on public health.
The organization recently completed a project, in partnership with Calgary’s Centre for Sexuality, that trained organizations in providing programs about sexual health and relationships and evaluated their effectiveness in preventing teen dating violence.
“Overall, youth are really receptive to the program,” MacLean says. Students gave feedback that their confidence grew in several areas, including setting boundaries and understanding healthy relationships.
Teen dating violence can have negative long-term health consequences, says MacLean. “As public health professionals, we have a really important role to play given that violence is preventable,” she said.
The Canadian Public Health Association’s project was one of 22 funded by the Public Health Agency of Canada aimed at preventing dating violence. Several of those projects are now finished.
The YWCA Metro Vancouver, which also received federal funding, recently finished offering its Dating Safe curriculum in two public high schools. The program taught students in Grade 8 through Grade 10 about topics including emotional intelligence, online safety, signs of teen dating violence and consent.
“We build space for young people to express their own ideas about healthy relationships,” said Ry Avola, the program’s facilitator.
Avola, who has worked on dating violence prevention for about 10 years, said there is an “overall sense of fear or anxiety” about life that may be causing teenagers to have “unstable relationships.”
But prevention programs are not enough to stop teen dating violence. Lee, at Simon Fraser University, studied analyses of teen dating violence prevention programs in the US and Canada. Her research, published in 2020, found that people who participated in the programs were less likely to commit dating violence. But participants in the programs were not less likely to be victims of teen dating violence.
“There was no impact on incidents of victimization,” she said.
Determining the reason for this difference was not the study’s goal, says Lee.
“Generally, we’re able to control our behavior and impact our behaviour in the sense that we can stop ourselves from being violent or perpetrating these incidents against others,” she said. “But we can’t necessarily control our partners.”
