Perceptions of Teen Dating Violence from A Cross-Cultural Perspective: The Need for Lifelong Equality Education

DOI

10.2991/978-94-6463-686-4_24How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Teen Dating Violence; Adolescents; Cross-cultural; Psychological Violence

Abstract

Teen Dating Violence (TDV) is a serious social problem, and since the 1990s, the World Health Organisation has recognised it as a public health problem. This study aims to know and understand the perceptions that adolescents from different cultural backgrounds, living in a multicultural context, have about the violence that can occur in unhealthy relationships. It is a qualitative study with a phenomenological approach. Fourteen adolescents were interviewed in depth. The results show processes of acculturation of young foreigners in the host society when pronouncing themselves on the topic of study. However, a cultural background (family culture) can be appreciated, being more noticeable in adolescents of Moroccan origin. Adolescents see technology as a means of creating social bonds, but they are aware that, through it, they are victims of violent be- haviour by their own partners. They especially highlight psychological violence and argue that it is very dangerous because it is invisible to the eyes of family and friends of the victims. However, they all assume in their relationships the beliefs of romantic love and understand jealousy and control towards the partner as signs of love. Although in theory they are aware of the types of violence, whether perpetrated online or offline, they tend to normalize this violence in their relationships. Spanish adolescents identify more marked forms of violence than other cultural groups, such as sexual violence. The findings of this study may help to design future practices to prevent dating violence among adolescents living in multicultural educational settings.

Copyright

© 2025 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Encarnación Soriano-Ayala
AU  - Verónica Caballero-Cala
AU  - Rachida Dalouh Ounia
AU  - Lidia Martínez-Jiménez
PY  - 2025
DA  - 2025/04/28
TI  - Perceptions of Teen Dating Violence from A Cross-Cultural Perspective: The Need for Lifelong Equality Education
BT  - Proceeding of the 10th International Conference on Lifelong Education and Leadership for ALL (ICLEL 2024)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 321
EP  - 337
SN  - 2667-128X
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-94-6463-686-4_24
DO  - 10.2991/978-94-6463-686-4_24
ID  - Soriano-Ayala2025
ER  -