Responses to youth intimate partner violence: the meaning of youth-specific factors and interconnections with resilience

ABSTRACT

Taking its starting point in a mixed methods study on Dating Violence/Youth Intimate Partner Violence (youth IPV), this article emphasizes the social sphere of youth IPV and contributes to a focus shift from consequences and risks to responses, resilience, and resistance. It asks how IPV-exposed youth describe their responses and those of their social networks to violence, and how these responses might be interconnected with resilience. By exploring the concepts of ‘resistance’ and ‘paradoxical resilience’, youth responses in the context of an abusive relationship are highlighted. The empirical data comes from 18 in-depth, ‘teller focused’ interviews with victimized youth (aged 17–23) in Sweden. A theoretical thematic analysis of the interviews surfaced responses from three different types of actors, all described from the youth perspective. Responses are discussed from the point of view that they can promote resilience, but also enable abuse to continue. Overall, the data show youth-specific factors that have meaningful bearing on responses as well as resilience. The article also proposes that responses should be an omnipresent concern for practitioners working with these young people and for the adults involved in their lives.

KEYWORDS:

• Youth intimate partner violence
• dating violence
• responses
• resilience
• resistance
• paradoxical resilience

Introduction

A growing body of research (e.g. Foshee et al. 2007; Romito, Beltramini, and Escribà-Agüir 2013; Barter et al. 2017), confirms that dating violence/youth intimate partner violence (youth IPV) constitutes a public health and societal issue important to combat. Prevalence rates for youth experiencing some type of IPV are as high as 42.9% in Norway (Hellevik and Överlien 2016) and 45% in England (Fox et al. 2014): in other words, large numbers of young people are subjected to violence within their romantic relationships. Studies show that the consequences of such victimization can be severe (Romito, Beltramini, and Escribà-Agüir 2013). A qualitative study examining the experiences of two Swedish young women who lived in violent relationships as teenagers showed that daily oppression and humiliation were internalized in the girls’ self-perceptions, manifesting as lowered self-esteem, feelings of worthlessness, and loss of sexual pride (Wiklund et al. 2010). Sexual dating violence in particular has been observed to be the strongest predictor of subsequent suicidal ideation in research on the effects of perpetrator identity in sexually victimized adolescent girls (Unlu and Cakaloz 2016). Studies have also found that the consequences of victimization vary by gender. Romito, Beltramini, and Escribà-Agüir (2013) found that adolescent girls exposed to IPV were more likely than boys to experience a range of negative outcomes, including depression, panic attacks, eating problems, and suicidal ideation. Other studies similarly indicate that girls exposed to violence seem to suffer more severe consequences than do boys (Barter et al. 2017; Palm et al. 2016). Some researchers have focused on risk factors for youth IPV, identifying pregnant teenagers and teenage mothers as a vulnerable group (Wood and Barter 2015). Alcohol consumption and marijuana use are other potential risk factors for dating violence victimization (Van Ouytsel, Ponnet, and Walrave 2017). Still other studies have examined risk factors among teenage girls in the care of child protective services (Manseau et al. 2008) and in detention centres (King et al. 2015), i.e. youth within the social welfare system.

Overall, this research shows that youth IPV is an extensive societal problem, that some groups are more at risk for youth IPV than others, and that IPV can have severe consequences. Not all survivors suffer adverse consequences, however, making it important to expand the notion of IPV victimization during youth and reminding us of the complexity of this time of life and the many different ways of understanding victimization. In this study, therefore, and taking a larger mixed methods study as our starting point, we analyze youth¹ narratives of IPV in an attempt to show interconnections between responses to violence and the concept of resilience, emphasizing the social sphere in which youth IPV occurs and the potential importance of that social sphere in promoting resilience. We also address the social conditions under which young people live, arguing that they may be important elements of any discussion on youth IPV. Our approach should contribute to a broader ecological understanding of youth IPV victimization (Heise 1998), showing how it takes place within a social context. It also helps shift focus from consequences and risks to responses, resilience, and resistance (cf. Överlien 2017; Hydén, Gadd, and Wade 2016). We ask: 1) How do victimized youths describe their own responses to violence and those of their social network, specifically the adults around them, such as parents and teachers? 2) How can the responses they describe be understood and discussed in relation to resilience? 3) Can we additionally harness the concept of ‘paradoxical resilience’ (Callaghan and Alexander 2015) to interpret actions taken by young people as strategies adopted within the context of their abusive relationships?

Theoretical framework and concepts

Broadly speaking, our theoretical grounding is the social studies of childhood and youth (James, Jenks, and Prout 1998), which offers the notion of childhood and youth as socially constructed. In this view, childhood and youth are variable periods. Further, youth is more than an age attribute: its meaning is dependent on both social and societal context (Jones 2011). This brings ‘age’, as a performed and reproduced social category (Krekula, Närvänen, and Näsman 2005; Staunæs 2003), and youth-specific factors into analytical focus. These youth-specific factors highlight the conditions of youth (Furlong, Woodman, and Wyn 2011) and the young people’s position within a societal context (cf. Gottzén and Korkmaz 2013), allowing us to focus specifically on the experience of being subjected to intimate partner violence as a youth.

Following the Centre for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), we define intimate partner violence (IPV) as: ‘physical violence, sexual violence, stalking and psychological aggression (including coercive tactics) by a current or former intimate partner (i.e. spouse, boyfriend/ girlfriend, dating partner, or ongoing sexual partner)’ (Breiding et al. 2015, 11). It has been established that IPV can be perpetrated in person or through digital media (Hellevik 2017; 2019). Some studies have argued that youth IPV differs from adult IPV in certain ways (adults more often cohabitate, share finances, have children, etc.; Cutter-Wilson and Richmond 2011). Other studies have found areas of similarity between youth and adult IPV (Zweig et al. 2014). The present study acknowledges that although the violent acts themselves may be the same, the socially constructed cultural and social conditions of youth (Furlong, Woodman, and Wyn 2011) bring up youth-specific factors that are pertinent to victimization, making the social sphere of youth IPV of analytical interest. Following on from this, we also draw on the notion of violence as a social phenomenon that occurs not in a vacuum but embedded in a social context where family and professionals may be able to intervene, thus placing their responses in focus. The responses of the social network can reveal how its members interpret the violence, including their constructions of both perpetrator and victim. Their responses send signals about violence, indicating what actions are and are not acceptable (Hydén, Gadd, and Wade 2016). In this study, we examine responses from both the informal network (i.e. family) and the professional network (i.e. school workers), always from the perspectives of the young people themselves. We will assume that adults such as parents and teachers are present and play active roles in the lives of young people, and we will suggest relevant youth-specific factors to consider in relation to responses to youth IPV (Gottzén and Korkmaz 2013).

This study helps shift focus from risks to resilience by interconnecting responses with the concept of resilience. Briefly, resilience refers to the phenomenon of overcoming stress or adversity (Rutter 2001). Ungar (2012) broadens the concept with a contextualized approach that he has termed ‘social ecological resilience’, adding ecological factors to our understanding of resilience – i.e. acknowledging the role of external factors. Along the same lines, López-Fuentes and Calvete (2015) noted that adult women exposed to IPV used various coping mechanisms, both individual (rediscovering oneself, humour, optimism, a focus on the present) and external (housing, informal and formal social support). They interpreted these as resilience-promoting factors for IPV-exposed women. In a further contribution to a social theory of resilience, Bottrell (2009) argues for including ‘resistance’ in our conceptualization of resilience, stating that ‘ … specific contexts of adversity may include and require resistance’ (p. 323). We draw upon both Ungar and Bottrell here. Our focus will be on what may be seen as the first level of an ecological analysis – the closest social network – and how its responses can be interpreted as interconnected with resilience. But we also acknowledge that these networks and responses exist within a larger context, where, for instance, questions of gender equality are important to address, thus highlighting the societal context as well (Bottrell 2009).

Building on Ungar’s contextualized understanding of resilience, and Bottrell’s proposal to include resistance in the conceptualization of resilience, we find ourselves aligned with Wade’s (1997) broad definition of resistance as:

… any mental or behavioural act through which a person attempts to expose, withstand, repel, stop, prevent, abstain from, strive against, impede, refuse to comply with, or oppose any form of violence or oppression (including any type of disrespect), or the conditions that make such acts possible [as well as] any attempt to imagine or establish a life based on respect and equality, on behalf of one’s self or others, including any effort to redress the harm caused by violence or other forms of oppression. (p. 25)

Resistance can hence be identified in numerous ways. Here, we focus on the behaviour of youth and their responses when subjected to IPV. To add another layer to the discussion of both resilience and resistance, we will also explore Callaghan and Alexander’s (2015) notion of ‘paradoxical resilience’.² Although arguably linked to resistance, this concept specifically highlights and refers to behaviours that might seem ‘dysfunctional’ but in fact represent highly located, creative, and agentic coping mechanisms. These strategies need to be understood in a specific context and from the youth perspective. Children and young people actively try to ‘navigate’ their way out of potentially harmful situations, suggesting that there can be more than one way to interpret their behaviours (Ungar 2012). Here, we focus on behaviours described by youth that might be viewed as dysfunctional, but within a specific context may also be understood as strategies adopted to avoid further harm: i.e. as expressions of ‘paradoxical resilience’.

We will present empirical data about responses by three different kinds of actors to youth IPV, all described from the youth perspective, to illustrate the social sphere surrounding youth IPV. By not conceiving of violence as a hidden phenomenon, we are able to focus on resistance and resilience, which, ‘however thwarted on any particular occasion, can be re-energized through supportive responses’ (Gadd and Hydén 2016, 216). We will analyze our empirical data using the concept of resilience, arguing that responses can promote resilience by helping to end violence exposure, but can also enable the violence to continue.

Methods and analysis

This article draws on a larger mixed methods study of youth IPV in Sweden.³ The aim of the study is to improve our understanding of IPV-exposed youth and their experiences. The present paper uses qualitative data focused on responses to IPV described in youth narratives.

Participants and data

Eighteen young people (aged 17–23) from across Sweden with experiences of IPV participated in the larger study. The present analysis draws on interviews with 11 of these participants, selected as being representative of the set as a whole. These 11 informants ranged in age from 17 to 21. Ten were young women who had been subjected to IPV in a heterosexual relationship. One was a young man who had been subjected to IPV in a homosexual relationship.

To recruit participants, we sent informational letters to youth organizations and other agencies that work with youth throughout Sweden. We also posted about the study on social media and distributed information at lectures, presentations etc., in an effort to recruit youth who had not sought help from the social welfare system. We defined ‘intimate relationship’ broadly; our only criterion was that the relationship in question had a romantic element. For ethical reasons, we also established the criterion that the abusive relationship must have ended. Our criteria made no stipulations with regard to gender: we looked for youth who had experienced partner violence, irrespective of gender or gender identity.

The data consist of in-depth qualitative interviews, conducted at different locations and settings chosen by the youth themselves, such as public libraries and school study rooms. Two informants, for reasons they specified, were interviewed via online video calls using the FaceTime computer application. An interview guide was developed; it served as a support tool during the interview, rather than a checklist of questions to be answered. To stimulate narratives, the interview used a ‘teller focused’ approach (Hydén 2014), where the interviewer asked open-ended questions to encourage informants to share their stories. Informants were asked to describe their relationships with their former abusive partners to capture their experiences of IPV. To capture experiences of sexual violence, for example, the interviewer asked questions about the informants’ sex life with the former partner, such as ‘If you had sex, how would he/she behave in those situation?’ or ‘Did he/she ever cross the line of what you would consider to be “OK”?’ When deemed appropriate, explicit questions about sexual violence were asked. Nevertheless, the interviewer was very attentive to the terms the informants used when describing their experiences, and – to take one example – did not use a term such as ‘rape’ if the informant had not used it first. Informants were also asked about their social networks and how their family, teachers, and friends responded if and when they found out about the violence experienced by the informants. Informants were encouraged to talk freely about their experiences, but the interviewer remained attentive to the risk of over-disclosure and whether the interview seemed to cause distress (Cater and Överlien 2014; Hydén 2014). The interviews ranged in duration from 45 min to over two and a half hours.

Ethics

Questions of ethics were considered both before and during the course of the study.⁴ Before each interview, informants received written and oral information about the project stressing that participation was voluntary. The right to withdraw from or opt out of the study was also made clear. All informants signed a consent form. Nevertheless, consent was viewed as an ongoing process (Cater and Överlien 2014; Spratt 2017). During the interview, the interviewer remained attentive to the well-being of the informant, repeatedly stressing that it was all right to not answer questions and not pushing the informant to over-disclose (Cater and Överlien 2014). At the close of each interview, the interviewer asked how the informant had experienced the interview situation and made space for additional questions about the study or study participation. The interviewer also made sure that informants knew where to seek support if they needed it.

Analysis

The present study draws on youth narratives⁵ about their exposure to IPV, using a theory-driven thematic analysis (Braun and Clarke 2006) to surface empirical data on responses to violence and identify patterns in the data. To capture the narratives, interviews were transcribed verbatim, respecting the narratives without restructuring or changing them. The transcripts were read through several times, noting possible narratives about how the social networks of informants responded to informants’ exposure to IPV. Next the narratives were categorized into broader themes, reflecting responses from three different groups of actors: parents, schools (teachers and principals), and the youth themselves, although all the responses were considered from the youth perspective. These responses were then analyzed with respect to the concepts of resilience (Ungar 2012; Bottrell 2009) and resistance (Wade 1997) as well as ‘paradoxical resilience’ (Callaghan and Alexander 2015); these concepts make up the study’s ‘analytical tool-box’.

Below, we present youth narratives⁶ that represent each of the three broader themes. The excerpts presented were chosen for the way they reveal both commonalities and differences within the theme (Dalen 2015; Braun and Clarke 2006).

Findings: youth narratives about responses

All of our informants spoke frankly about the ways in which they had been subjected to IPV. For many, this occurred in what they considered to be their first ‘real’ relationship. Specific experiences, however, differed. The duration of the abusive relationships varied from a few weeks to several years; the level of commitment varied from ‘just seeing someone’ to being in a committed relationship; and some informants described being subjected to physical, psychological, and sexual violence, as well as ‘bizarre acts’ (as described by Överlien 2013), while others described mainly psychological violence. But their stories also displayed commonalities. Parents, especially mothers, often had a central role. Friends and peers were foregrounded as well, although many informants also described how they had stopped ‘hanging out’ with their friends, thus placing them on the periphery of the story. Below, therefore, we focus on responses to IPV by three different key actors: parents, schools, and the young people themselves, all described from the youth perspective. We begin with parental responses, allowing us to portray the social position of our youth informants as ‘children’. This leads into their daily life at school and a focus on the schools’ responses. Lastly, we look at responses by youth themselves to being subjected to IPV.

Youth narratives of parental response to youth IPV victimization

In all our informants’ narratives, parents and parents of partners play a central role. This is exemplified in an interview with 18-year-old Jennie. Jennie described visiting her boyfriend’s house for the first time; while she was there, her boyfriend’s mother called from work to ask what he and Jennie wanted for dinner. When the mother arrived home, she served dinner to the couple, who were both 15 at the time. In this narrative, the mother is clearly positioned as a parent, providing dinner for her teenage son and his girlfriend. The positioning of the two youth as children brings up cultural and social factors that are pertinent to findings on responses to IPV (Gottzén and Korkmaz 2013). Social factors characteristic of youth—such as the fact that most youth in Sweden live with their parents, thus their parents are presumably present in their lives to a large extent—are important to address. This becomes evident in the interview conducted with Lisa, who met her former boyfriend when both were 14 and living with their parents. Lisa described her relationship with both her mother and father as ‘good’, even though it probably could be ‘tighter’. Lisa and her boyfriend stayed together for two and a half years, during which time he subjected Lisa to psychological violence. Lisa described being controlled by her boyfriend and forced by him to stop spending time with her friends. Her boyfriend also systematically put her down, calling her names such as ‘slut’, ‘whore’ and ‘idiot’, placing limits on her by invoking stereotypes of young women as contemptible sexual beings. In the excerpt below, Lisa describes how this relationship ended, and we see the important role played by her mother:

We were getting our pictures taken at school and he, uh, he thought I should wear one of his shirts to get my picture taken, but I thought, like, ‘No, it’s too big, it like, looks like I’m wearing a trash bag, I don’t want that.’ So I said no and he gets super angry and I got so angry I started to cry, so I walk down, mum is standing in the hall way and sees I’m upset, and I don’t want to tell her what’s going on, and then she just says, ‘Is it him?’ and I’m like, ‘Yes,’ and she’s like, uh, ‘Leave your phone at home today and don’t answer any of his texts, we deal with it when you get home,’ and it was like that, then she calls his mum and says, ‘It’s like this,’ and, like, it ends with mum saying, even before I told her, ‘Lisa is breaking up with him’ so it was like, ‘you can tell him that, so he’ll leave her alone’ […]

Lisa and her boyfriend did indeed break up after the phone call. Another informant, Olivia, shared a similar experience. Olivia was living with her mother, stepfather, and siblings when at age 14 she entered into a relationship with a 16-year-old boy that lasted about nine months. During the interview, Olivia described being abused psychologically and sexually by her boyfriend, and being controlled and systematically put down by him. If Olivia said no to sex, her boyfriend got very moody, to that extent that Olivia ‘agreed’ to have sex to avoid his mood swings. Oliva shared how, during the course of the relationship, she told her mother about being kept by her boyfriend from seeing her friends. Her mother then tried to make Olivia realize that no one had the right to control her. Later in the interview, when the interviewer asked Olivia about ‘the worst thing’ her boyfriend ever did, the way Olivia’s mother responded to help her daughter became more evident. Olivia described how, after their breakup, her boyfriend threatened to post ‘very sexually provocative’ photos of Olivia online. She then related the events that followed, in which both her mother and her boyfriend’s mother played an important role:

Olivia

… I went home to my mum after that and I was a total wreck then, and then she called his mum and told her everything and what he had said, and shared basically everything about our relationship, what had happened, and she had no clue

Interviewer

His mum?

Olivia

Mm, he had said, he had said that I was the one who did that to him, um, but then she realized that it was actually he who, uh, did all that to me, and then they decided that the two of us weren’t allowed to spend time together without an adult nearby and all that, uh, and after that I like haven’t been in contact with him in that way

Both Lisa and Olivia thus shared narratives about a parental response that helped bring an end to the violence they were experiencing. Olivia additionally describes a joint response by her mother and her boyfriend’s mother: namely, the decision not to allow the two teenagers to spend time alone together any more.

Other informants described other kinds of responses. Hanna, for example, was about 15 when she met her former boyfriend, then 20. They were together for four years, during which time Hanna’s boyfriend abused her physically, psychologically, and sexually. He was older, and lived in his own apartment; Hanna still lived at home with her mother, father, and siblings. During the interview, Hanna described preferring to talk with her father during the ‘hard times’, since he usually responded more gently, by asking her about her own thoughts and feelings. Her mother, in contrast, tended to blame Hanna, even though, as Hanna stresses, there was ‘no end’ to how much she cared. In focusing further on Hanna’s parents’ responses, one occasion stands out. During her interview, Hanna described one night when her boyfriend wanted to have sex and she did not. She managed to leave the apartment and contact her parents. In this excerpt, she describes what happened when she joined them:

[…] I get in the car and they yell, ‘He’s an idiot, how can he act like this, and how stupid are you?’ and stuff like that, they accuse me a lot and, uh, him, but in the middle of all this I get really upset, and I was like, ‘I need to get back to my boyfriend,’ uh, and they were like, ‘Are you that stupid, you should never go back,’ and this was quite early and I stayed for a year and a half after that, or no, two, I don’t know, I stayed with him for a long time after that […]

Hanna’s parents got upset and called her stupid; they got angry and placed the blame on her. This type of response may be seen as one that did not contribute to ending the violence, since Hanna stayed with her boyfriend for a long time after this incident. Magnus offered another example of a response that did not contribute to ending an abusive relationship. Magnus was 16 years old when he met his former boyfriend, who was eight years older. Since the boyfriend ‘was so much older’, they at first hid their relationship from Magnus’s parents. They stayed together for five years; as Magnus put it, he ‘grew up’ with his boyfriend. During his interview, Magnus described a ‘family meeting’ in which he, his grandparents, his godparents, and his parents (along with their partners) discussed whether or not Magnus should report his boyfriend to the police. Prior to the family meeting, the boyfriend had been physically violent toward Magnus in a public park, leaving him wandering the streets, bleeding. Magnus’ parents exhibited a powerful reaction in convening a meeting to discuss how best to handle the situation. However, when the interviewer asked Magnus what the family meeting led to, he replied ‘Absolutely nothing’. Upon reflection he said, ‘Because, I, I was blinded by love […]’. Thus, even the arguably powerful reaction by his parents did not help Magnus leave his abusive boyfriend. This result underlines the power of intimacy and ‘love’. It also shows the complexity of responses to IPV and how difficult it is for a social network to know what response will lead to a preferred outcome.

Youth narratives often involved not only their own parents but also the parents of their partners. Malin met her former boyfriend when both were 16 and first-year students at the same high school. In this excerpt, the interviewer is following up on Malin’s statement that her boyfriend’s mother had told her he suffered from ‘aggression problems’:

Interviewer

Okay, um, and his mother, did she say anything else, after the first [when the mother told Malin about her boyfriend’s aggression problems] … ?

Malin

Yes, and that what’s most painful I think, because she, it was about in the middle of our relationship, when she noticed that I was in bed crying um and she heard that XXX (the ex-boyfriend) had hit me so she stood outside his door and was like, ‘XXX now you have to stop, she’s crying,’ and he had just told her to fuck off, and then she left, she didn’t like open the door or anything um, and because he had been aggressive to her in the past so she should have known, but, I mean like, yes, I just got so upset, um, so they didn’t say anything, they never said anything, they just told him to quiet down, sort of

This form of response can best be described as a lack of response: the boyfriend’s mother did not act upon the violent situation, and Malin experienced her lack of action as painful. The parent in this case is not Malin’s mother; nevertheless, Malin positions herself as a child who expects a reaction from her boyfriend’s mother. Overall, the roles played by parents in the stories reveal a youth-specific factor that is important to consider, as parents do have the ability to respond to the exposure of their children to violence (Gottzén and Korkmaz 2013).

Youth narratives about school responses to youth IPV victimization

Another youth-specific factor to consider is the fact that most Swedish youth are enrolled in high school and spend most of their day on school premises. Many high school students have a large part of their social network at school, including friends as well as teachers and other school staff. But school may also be an arena for violence, as Malin’s interview pointed out: the first time her ex-boyfriend hit her was at school. School and teacher responses also came into focus in an interview with Michaela. In the summer of the year Michaela turned 14, she saw a 19-year-old boy for a few weeks. She described being raped by this boy at a party. When school started in the fall, the two were supposed to eat lunch in the same cafeteria. This led to Michaela to skip school frequently during eighth grade, since she did not want to risk bumping into the boy. Following up, the interviewer asked Michaela about potential responses from her teacher:

Michaela

No, like, after we filed the report and all that, when mum and dad found out, then they told my teacher, and then they got it but it was still like, I was absent maybe two three days a week for the whole eighth grade so it was like, yes, no but no one, like, asked, because you always called to tell them you were sick

Interviewer

So no teacher ever got worried and called your parents, kind of to see what was going on?

Michaela

Exactly, no, because, I think it has something to do with, I mean, even though I was absent a lot I was never in danger of getting an F, because I, I’ve always been, I mean I’ve always done well in school, I mean, you could put it like this, a regular person could probably have gotten an F in most of their classes if they were absent that much, but I somehow managed to pass

On paper, Michaela seemed to be doing fine, as she was passing her classes despite her extensive absenteeism. Michaela herself thought that her good grades were one reason no one at school reached out to her parents to find out what was going on or questioned the fact that she was regularly calling in sick. This is an example of a lack of response by the school, from Michaela’s perspective, and a case in which what we might call a protective factor (Ungar et al. 2017; Vinnerljung, Berlin, and Hjern 2010)—i.e. academic success—presumably led to this failure to respond.

Maria also described a failure by her school to respond to IPV. She had been in an abusive relationship with a boy she met at school when both were 16. They stayed together for about two years and both still attended the same school when the relationship ended. Maria described meeting with her supervisor and principal after filing a police report about her ex-boyfriend. She wanted to make clear to them that she did not want to be in contact with her former boyfriend under any circumstances. At first, the principal assured Maria that she would be safe at school and instituted rules to that effect: for example, Maria and the boyfriend were not allowed to be in the same classroom. Here, however, Maria describes her ex-boyfriend breaking the rules and the school failing to follow through on its promise:

I went to the principal so many times, with pictures of him in my classroom, I had proof, once I went to the school counsellor and was upset, uh, and she texted, sent an email to the principal, I figure that should have some effect because there was another person who could actually say that it happened, no effect, as of today still no effect, and he can keep going without any repercussions at all … 

Maria described further details about the response by her school and one day telling another teacher about the situation. The teacher responded by asking if she (the teacher) could e-mail the principal and suggest sharing the situation with the other teachers at the school, so that if one of them saw Maria with her ex-boyfriend they would know that he might be there against Maria’s will. Maria encouraged the teacher to send the email, and she did, but later the principal e-mailed Maria to say, ‘you should not talk to other teachers about what happened, and you should stay away from XXX (the ex-boyfriend)’. Maria was left feeling that she ‘had done something wrong’. Arguably, then, in this case the school demonstrated a lack of response. Both a school counsellor and a teacher did respond actively when Maria reached out, but their response was shut down by the principal, who had the formal power to act.

Youth narratives about their own responses to being subjected to intimate partner violence

One pattern clearly visible in the interview data was the wide spectrum of actions taken by informants when subjected to violence. These actions took many forms, but shared a common denominator: all can be viewed as forms of resistance (Wade 1997). Looking at resistance in terms of changing behaviour, there is the example of Lisa, who said she changed the way she dressed: buying shirts a size bigger to cover her bum because her boyfriend demanded it. Lovisa said she stopped engaging in after-school activities and avoided being social, because those things made her boyfriend ‘very angry’. These changes can be interpreted as resistance following Wade’s (1997) definition, in which resistance includes behavioural acts used to prevent the abusive partner’s reaction. Another action taken by informants that can be seen as a form of resistance was enlisting help and support from their social network. Natalie, for example, said she told her friends that her ex-boyfriend was stalking her at school, leading them to call a janitor for help when Natalie’s boyfriend showed up at her locker.

Informant responses via social media deserve specific attention. As discussed by Stonard et al. (2015) and Hellevik (2019), social media allow former abusive partners to see where their ex-partners are, with whom they communicate, whose photos they ‘like’, etc. These and other negative aspects of social media were apparent in the interviews reviewed for this study. Paulina, for example, commented on how her abusive former boyfriend kept making fake profiles on social media as a way of staying in contact with her. She, like other informants, responded by blocking him ‘everywhere’. Maria took a different view of the role of social media. Here, she describes keeping her abusive ex-boyfriend on Snapchat, in spite of her desire to keep him out of her life:

So I actually kept him there (on Snapchat), I could see where he was, um, whether he was at school, on the weekends it was great, if I was out at a bar with my girlfriends I didn’t want to go to the same bar as him … 

By keeping her ex-boyfriend on Snapchat, Maria could see his location and avoid running into him. Her use of social media to keep track of his whereabouts was a way to claim power and resist his violence, to negotiate their power dynamic and retake control in a seemingly powerless situation.

Some other responses to violence described by informants can be understood as actions taken to avoid further harm. During her interview, Jennie spoke about how her former boyfriend abused her physically. She described how they argued and how her boyfriend then would hit her. She further described sometimes trying to fight back, but realizing it was pointless since it would only make her boyfriend more violent. She concluded that she ‘knew that, like, I would only be hurting myself’ by fighting back. Jennie returns to this point in the excerpt below, where she says there was no point fighting back when her boyfriend wanted to have sex and she did not:

… as I said before, it was not, like, there was no point, because then he just made it worse, um, so yes but like he, he stopped caring if I wanted to have sex or not, he kind of just had sex with me anyway, even though I didn’t want to, and like … like even though I said ‘No not now’, like, he thought it was, like, funny, and I don’t know, maybe he interpreted what I said as a joke or something, but like, it, sometimes I got so angry, like, like shocked, and like ‘What the fuck are you doing?’ and tried to push him back and sometimes it worked and he got offended and like, just, and then he got, like, angry, but sometimes when I felt like ‘Okay no it’s not worth it to fight back now’, so I had, like, no emotions, I just turned blank inside, and, like, let it happen, because I, I had like no choice … 

Here Jennie describes how, in the context of an abusive relationship, she came to realize that it would be better to respond in a way that satisfied her abuser sexually, which can be understood as a strategy to avoid further harm. She reflects on how at first she would try to fight back, and that it sometimes worked; nevertheless, she ultimately responded by ‘turning blank’ and ‘letting it happen’. As Wade (1997) notes, ‘in the most extreme cases of violence, where the victim has every reason to believe she will be killed or seriously harmed in some other way for even the slightest opposition, the only possibility for the realization of resistance may be in the privacy afforded by the mind’ (p. 30).

Discussion

This article has presented empirical data about responses to youth intimate partner violence (IPV) by three different types of actors: parents, schools, and youth themselves, all from the youth perspective. Overall, the data show that youth IPV is a social act (Hydén, Gadd, and Wade 2016) and that factors that are specific to youth, such as dependence on parents and attendance at school, have an important bearing on these responses (Gottzén and Korkmaz 2013). In the following, we will continue the discussion of youth-specific factors, stressing how these can be addressed when exploring the concept of resilience, including ‘paradoxical resilience’ (Callaghan and Alexander 2015).

First, in order to better describe these youth-specific factors and how they affect IPV victimization, we need to discuss the social meaning of ‘youth’ as a potential period of self-discovery and of first experiences with romantic love and intimacy. Many informants in this study, for instance, said they were exposed to IPV in their first ‘real’ intimate relationship. For some of them, this first relationship experience was with an older partner, a factor that has been found to be associated with IPV victimization (Hellevik and Överlien 2016), and might bring with it additional contextual aspects to consider. It is also important to point out that in these cases, the informants had no experience of a ‘healthy’ relationship prior to the abusive one. This can be contrasted with the findings of López-Fuentes and Calvete (2015), where adult women subjects used various individual strategies, including ‘rediscovering oneself’, to cope with their IPV exposure. Arguably, it is not possible for youth to ‘rediscover’ themselves, as their process of ‘discovery’ is still ongoing. This is an example of the particularity of youth and how exposure to violence during this period may differ from exposure as a more experienced adult, since individual factors that promote resilience may differ between youth and adults. The same apples to external factors of resilience. Like the women in López-Fuentes and Calvete’s (2015) study, the youth in this study also brought up external factors. Youth-specific factors, however (living with parents, attending school etc.) made their romantic relationships different than those of adults, which also affected external factors associated with resilience. As an example, López-Fuentes and Calvete present ‘housing’ as an external factor associated with resilience: a factor that is arguably less relevant for youth exposed to IPV. Instead, for youths, their parents may become an external factor of resilience, as they have an obligation to ensure their children’s wellbeing and can offer their support and help if/when it is needed. This youth-specific factor may be viewed as one point of interconnection between responses and resilience, as the way in which parents respond to youth IPV can arguably influence resilience and resistance (Gadd and Hydén 2016). Parental responses, from the youth perspective, are shown to vary (cf. Weisz et al. 2007; Gottzén and Korkmaz 2013). Both Lisa and Olivia described one type of parental response when they described how their mothers took action to change their situations. From a resilience perspective, we can call their actions examples of resilience-promoting parental responses, since they helped end the exposure to violence. The child position vis-à-vis the mother is also prominent: the mothers took control of the situations, ensuring the wellbeing of their children. Other youth gave examples of parental responses that did not contribute to ending the violence, and consequently did not promote resilience. For example, Hanna described her parents getting upset at a juncture when she needed help and support. Hanna stayed with her abusive boyfriend for a long time after that episode; i.e. her violence exposure continued. Overall, it is clear that parents figure centrally in youth narratives, raising the issue of whether they have the responsibility and ability to intervene in the romantic relationships of their children in such a way as to promote resilience.

In this study, parents, as part of their children’s closest social network, constitute the first level of a social ecology approach (Ungar 2015). Moving to the next level, we can look at another youth-specific factor: school, and descriptions by informants of the responses of their teachers and principals to violence. As young people spend several hours a day at school, adult educators are arguably also very much a part of their social network. Additionally, it is distinctly possible for a victim and perpetrator to be enrolled in the same school, have lunch in the same cafeteria, or even attend the same classes. This poses additional challenges for schools, above and beyond their general responsibility for all enrolled students. Nevertheless, our data offer examples of schools being unresponsive, again from the youth perspective. Michaela described how no one at school responded to her frequent absenteeism; she herself thought the lack of response was because she was doing well academically, despite her exposure to violence. Academic success could be a resilience-promoting factor (Ungar et al. 2017; Vinnerljung, Berlin, and Hjern 2010), but here, paradoxically, it may have become a factor that stopped Michaela from getting the help and support she needed. Maria related that she explicitly asked her school for help to stay safe, but the school failed to support her and continued to allow her former boyfriend to contact her during the school day. Schools could possibly have the power to promote resilience for IPV-exposed youth; however, as was also addressed by several informants, this requires both awareness of youth IPV victimization and an active response.

Focusing on the youth themselves and their responses to their own victimization, we shift focus to agency. We can describe the behavioural acts undertaken by the informants in this study as acts meant to resist and prevent violence, and we can see how they adopted strategies to handle the violence they were subjected to. For Michaela, above, getting good grades helped make her victimization invisible. Similarly, we can interpret Jennie’s actions as an expression of ‘paradoxical resilience’ (Callaghan and Alexander 2015). Both young women strategically avoided potentially (even more) harmful situations. Their specific actions – cutting classes and ‘agreeing’ to unwanted sex – might be seen as a destructive way of handling these situations. An alternative interpretation, however, is that these young women were acting to protect themselves and prevent their situations from escalating. Thus we see that even when youth experience little scope for action and limited empowerment, they can still adopt strategies to avoid further harm. To be clear, this is in no way an argument for shifting focus from holding perpetrators accountable for their violence, nor is it a denial of the victimization these young people experience. On the contrary, it is an argument for a more contextual understanding of youth IPV, for investigating the dynamics of abusive relationships, and for shedding light on the agency and resistance of young people in the midst of such relationships. Furthermore, it is evident that listening to young people’s own voices gives us the opportunity to grasp their experiences and the nuances of these experiences, and is arguably a must for achieving a more complete understanding of youth IPV.

Limitations

A larger sample size and multiple interviews with informants could have provided even deeper insight. Youth who have been exposed to IPV are a difficult group to reach, however, and arranging for more than one interview was difficult due to their busy lives. Additionally, we felt that the interviews, many of which lasted for more than two hours, ended up going into considerable depth, as informants opened up and shared their stories. Hence, the interviews in their present form have provided rich data. Interviews with parents could also have been conducted; but this would have been beyond the scope of this study.

Conclusions and implications

Our findings in this article shed light on the social sphere in which youth intimate partner violence (youth IPV) takes place, and the potential importance of parent and teacher responses to youth IPV for promoting resilience in IPV-exposed youth. We show that it is essential to acknowledge youth-specific factors in relation to both responses and resilience, and we show how the latter two concepts can be interconnected. We also show that victimized youth exhibit some common patterns of behavioural acts and responses that can be framed as resistance, including acts that can be interpreted as expressions of ‘paradoxical resilience’.

Overall, these findings underline a need for further focus on youth that have been subjected to IPV, both in research and in policy-making. They add a contextual understanding, one that also incorporates the dynamics of an abusive relationship, to the current youth IPV knowledge base. For youth IPV victims, social responses from their immediate network—including friends, family, and school staff—importantly influence their own responses and resistance, and thus their resilience. Therefore, these social responses should be an omnipresent concern for practitioners working with young survivors of IPV, as well as for other adults, such as parents and school staff, who figure in the everyday lives of these young people. Responses to youth IPV should also be within the scope of future research: for example, examining best practices for how schools and agencies should respond, in an overall attempt to shed light on this social problem. Moreover, it is important to stress even more clearly how important it is to include young people in research that concerns them (Överlien and Holt 2017), as their views may differ from the ‘adult world’s’ views on prevention and support (Hellevik et al. 2015). Youth voices should be foregrounded, in the recognition that young people are themselves agents and can provide knowledge necessary to combat youth IPV.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Youth/s’ and ‘young people’/’young woman’/’young man’ will be used interchangeably.

2. Arguably, ‘paradoxical resilience’ (Callaghan and Alexander 2015) can be linked to Ungar’s (2004, 2015) concept of ‘hidden resilience’ as well as his arguments that maladaptive coping can bring with it a type of resilience. Overall, these concepts function to highlight patterns of coping behaviours that might be overlooked from an outside perspective. Ungar (2015) explains the difference between hidden resilience and maladaptive coping by stating that it depends ‘on the discursive power of an individual or family to convince others that they are doing the best they can with the resources they have available’ (p. 8). In this study, to further focus on a specific context without discussing discursive power systems, the concept of ‘paradoxical resilience’ will be explored.

3. Funded by the Swedish Crime Victim Compensation and Support Authority.

4. The Regional Ethical Review Board in Stockholm, Sweden, approved the study in May 2016.

5. ’Stories’ and ’narratives’ will be used interchangeably.

6. All names and places have been changed to ensure confidentiality.