Prioritizing Safety: Violent Environments and Teen Dating Violence

Background/Purpose: Teen dating violence (TDV) is an adverse childhood experience that can mirror patterns of domestic violence, including coercive control, physical harm, and emotional manipulation. While prior research highlights the long-term developmental consequences of TDV, such as increased vulnerability to depression, anxiety, PTSD, and future relational violence, it remains critical to understand the contextual and interpersonal factors that increase the risk of sexual TDV specifically. This study aimed to examine the association between exposure to violence at the family (intimate partner violence) and community level and the risk of experiencing sexual TDV among adolescents in the United States, while accounting for demographic, school, and personal safety factors.

Methods: Data were drawn from the 2023 Youth Risk Behavior Survey, a cross-sectional survey of high school students (grades 9–12) in the United States (n=20,103). The inclusion criterion of “having dated or gone out with someone in the past 12 months” was utilized to extract a sub-sample of students with recent dating experience (n=17,945). After narrowing the sample to adolescents who reported valid responses across all included study measures, the analytical sample totaled 10,245. The dependent variable was self-reported experience of sexual TDV (continuous). Independent variables included a range of school and personal safety variables (yes/no; i.e., experience of sexual abuse), exposure to IPV in the house (no/yes), and community violence (no/yes). Hierarchical linear regression was conducted in SPSS (v29.0) to test the associations between exposure to violence and sexual TVD, with demographic variables entered in the first block, school and personal safety variables in the second block, and exposure to family and community violence in the third block.

Results: Most of the sample identified as male (52%), white (41.9%), and within the age of 15–17 years old (76.2%). Hierarchical linear regression analyses demonstrated that gender was a significant predictor in the first model, with girls at higher risk of victimization (B=−0.137). The second model, which incorporated personal and school safety factors, explained a substantially larger portion of the variance in sexual teen dating violence (ΔR2=0.071), with experience of sexual abuse showing the strongest effect (t=14.398, B=0.279, p<0.001). In the final model, exposure to family violence (IPV) and community violence were introduced, which led to a small, significant improvement from the previous model (ΔR2=0.005), explaining 0.9% of the variance.

Conclusion/Implications: Findings confirm that exposure to violence, whether directly experienced (i.e., sexual abuse) or observed (i.e., IPV), contributes to an increased risk of sexual teen dating violence. The results underscore the need for prevention efforts that address multiple ecological systems in a young person’s life (e.g., home, school, and community). Such comprehensive violence prevention strategies should extend focus beyond risk factors, which are not always malleable (i.e., experience of sexual abuse). Programs and policies that focus on protective factors, as well as those that advocate for safer communities and schools, are essential to TDV prevention. Future research should prioritize identifying protective factors and consider longitudinal designs to better understand how risk and resilience develop over time through various developmental stages.