I am writing a paper on teaching adolscents to be able to discern discriminate abusive situations from nonabusive situations. Very briefly, please provide a good definition of abuse.You might look at the recent issue of the journal _Sex_Roles_ for an article by Jennifer Langhinrichsen-Roling. There are also two or three rebuttal/critique articles in that issue of _Sex_Roles_ in which the author(s) bat around the definition of “abuse.”
Next, kindly identify what sorts of abuse are unique to teen-agers/adolescents? There is research by Christopher Eckhardt and his colleagues into dating violence; this would be a good start. Please include an article by Downey, Feldman and Ayduk (2000 – ish) in _Personal_Relationships_. It pertains to abuse in college dating relationships.
Lastly, and probably the most important…build a “checklist” of behaviors that would be fairly universally considered as abuse and provide some practical tools to help adolscents work through identifying them and avoiding them.
Thank you!