Why don’t teenage girls see sexist violence?

The Cepca coordinator reflects on how abuse occurs at increasingly younger ages and the advance of sexual violence among minors as a result of pornography abuse

They don’t see the violence. They are mistreating them and yet they don’t see her. This is the situation in which many teenagers find themselves. Every year, cases of minors who suffer from bad treatments in his first relationships and many wonder how it is possible that they did not see it, how, with all the information there is, they were blind to what they were experiencing. “It’s what everyone is asking,” he admits. Belén Alvite, coordinator of the Center for Studies and Prevention of Addictive Behaviors (Cepca). The main reason why these girls are not aware of what is happening to them is a warp woven for millennia that establishes that this is normal. But is not. And it has many risks. Because at those ages, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen… years old, the brain structures are not yet consolidated. The consequences are more serious than in an adult woman.

The prospect is not encouraging. “Sexist violence increasingly starts earlier, it occurs at younger ages,” laments Alvite, who insists that the younger the victims are, the less prepared they are to face it and the more serious the consequences are, the residue it can leave for their adult life. “It is difficult for them to see that it is sexist violence because it is difficult for them to identify what is violence and what is not,” indicates the expert, who emphasizes that in adolescence it is difficult to know where the limits are because it is a stage in which “extremes” prevail.

Aggression and violence

They also have a hard time differentiating aggressiveness from violence. Aggression, explains Alvite, is a behavior that “everyone” can have at any given moment: “Because of something specific, circumstantial, anyone can go off the deep end. But there is no instrumentalization, something that does exist in the case of the violence”. Curiously, Abusers hide behind aggressiveness to try to hide their violence. When they apologize they use, precisely, the argument of aggressiveness, which has been something circumstantial. But not. It is violence. All the waste of seduction previously used with the victim makes her believe that, indeed, this is the case. “Before reaching that, he has seduced her, he has surrounded her, it has all been good things until he has turned her into a satellite that orbits around her. And he makes her smaller and smaller,” explains Alvite. At first there is no physical violence. And when the situation worsens, the girl says that he has changed. “But it’s not like that, he hasn’t changed, he was already like that, he always has been that way, but she couldn’t see it,” she says.

Paradoxically, sexist violence in adolescence it happens much more in public spaces than in the cases of an adult couple. For a very simple reason: “They don’t have private spaces.” It happens in bars, in parks, in high school environments, in nightclubs… There are witnesses. “The humiliation is even greater,” says Alvite. And those witnesses, even when they are her closest friends, if they say something, in most cases those comments blame the victim.

“That ‘you are like this because you want to’ or ‘if you continue with him it is because you want to’ are loaded with guilt”, indicates the expert, who warns that this can have, in many cases, the opposite effect to what they intend. They make the young woman feel even more alone than she already feels and she can, in many cases, explain what they have said to her partner, her abuser, who finds in this the perfect fuel and unexpected to continue isolating her. The perfect conditions are created for him to remind her of “all the good and beautiful things” he has done for her, what he loves her, as opposed to those friends who judge her, who are not happy about their relationship, who judge for once. that he was wrong.

“In addition to what he is already distancing her from her surroundings, she voluntarily separates herself even more because they are telling her things she does not want to hear.” and because they don’t want to feel vulnerable,” says the Cepca coordinator. “The same thing happens with adults. “They are moving away,” she adds. She herself recognizes that the friends’ “visceral” reactions correspond to adolescence. “Everything is very intense, for the good and the bad,” she points out.

The redeemed bad guy

Furthermore, in general, but especially at that age, old tastes still weigh. Even today, a good part of women still find “the redeemed bad guy” attractive, very sexy.. That pattern of a man who is tough and mean to everyone, but “kind and loving” to his partner. “‘With me’, they tell you,” says the expert. And there, in those patterns that are attractive and that should not be, there is a lot to do. “In families,” she clarifies. There you have to work a lot on the patterns. “Many times the boy who is vulnerable, sensitive or emotional is identified as weak. That is not the case. And that association should not be made,” reflects Alvite, who defends that the root of sexist violence is in the emotional construction that is made in families. Furthermore, she flatly denies the widely shared idea that an abuser is “a good man who does bad things.” “He is a bad man who sometimes does good things,” defends the expert.

In addition to the physical violence, the psychological violence, and the humiliation suffered by adolescent victims, there is increasingly added sexual violence. “Within the couple, at very very early and very powerful ages,” he points out. Something that has two “very clear” causes.: they are emotionally still half-built people and the abuse of pornography. “I’m talking about abuse, not use, because the porn they see at such a tender age is so brutal and so violent that the use is not understood, it is abuse,” she justifies.

When they go to schools with the ‘Sextima’t’ program – “it has already fallen short, we must offer deeper and more constant training, we have to multiply” – it is the students themselves who confess to them that they watch pornography. “Some are very clear that this has nothing to do with real life, but many are not,” he points out. They watch it to get excited and they tell how much their friends consume it and that, if they do it, it is to learn. The consequences are devastating. Teenagers who subject their partners to real sexual aberrations because they want to imitate what they have seen in porn.

Everyone raises their hands

Even if they live it, even if they know of cases. They don’t see it. 20% of adolescents deny sexist violence. To those who do not openly acknowledge it, we must add those who think it but do not say it because they know it is not right. “And in that 20% there are also girls,” says Alvite. And this despite the fact that they themselves may have been victims at some point. Alvite is still waiting so that when in the workshops he asks women who at some point in their lives have suffered sexist violence to raise their hands, they will not raise their hands.

Added to all this, now, are the new avenues that the sexist violence to keep advancing. Like artificial intelligence. The case of the boys who used it to make realistic images of their naked classmates is just the preview of what can happen. “It is sexist violence,” he insists, against those who defend that it is not. And the cases that are no longer seen in adolescents but in children. Like the six-year-old girl who was sexually assaulted by three classmates in Badajoz. “Every time at younger ages,” she reiterates.