Of the 458 Fairfield County high school students surveyed by the Peace Project in the past year, 26 percent said they had been punched, kicked or slapped by their partner, 16 percent said their partner had forced them into having sex and 42 percent said they do not see their friends as often as they would like because their partner is jealous.
These were among the statistics revealed during a Center for Youth Leadership press conference recently conducted at Brien McMahon High School, at which student activists vowed to address teen dating violence and child abuse.
Representing the BMHS Peace Project, Debbie Chajon introduced the audience to the shockingly high prevalence of teen dating violence and the negative effects physical, emotional and verbal associated with it. According to Chajon, dating violence can cause teens to feel self-conscious and afraid, to not want to attend school and to have difficulty paying attention and studying. Victims of teen dating violence also are at considerably higher risk than their peers of using alcohol, tobacco and cocaine, becoming pregnant and considering or attempting suicide, she said. They also are more likely to be involved with other types of violence.
Chajon said the Peace
Project plans to address teen dating violence in a number of ways. First, it is awarding a $1,000 challenge grant to a teen dating violence program at Greenwich High School the only other student-led dating violence program in Fairfield County, which adopted the model used at BMHS. If the Greenwich program is able to raise $1,000 on its own, the BMHS Peace Project will match that $1,000. The Peace Project also is leading public awareness activities at Greenwich High School.
In addition, the Peace Project is asking Mayor Richard Moccia to designate the first week of February as Teen Dating Violence Prevention and Awareness Week in Norwalk; leading a street outreach campaign to distribute information on dating violence to teens; discussing the issue in classrooms and community centers; hosting a monthly House Party, an event featuring spoken word pieces and music; organizing a pop art campaign to address dating violence; working with the Board of Education and unions to offer a training workshop for teachers and security officers; campaigning for the state Department of Health to add a question about emotional abuse to the School Health Survey-Youth Risk Behavior that it administers to students every other year; and urging people to call domestic violence prevention agencies for guidance and services.
Tyler Calder spoke for the Senators Community Foundation about child abuse. She provided similarly alarming statistics for example, 900,000 children were abused in America last year, among them 10,000 in Connecticut and 248 in Norwalk and explained that the SCF intends to educate people about the issue by leading public awareness activities in schools and the community. SCF members volunteer weekly at Kids in Crisis, a state agency offering free counseling, intervention and emergency shelter 24 hours a day for infants, children, adolescents and their families, and host a monthly fun activity for children who have been victims of abuse, accordingto Calder.
The SCF's current focus is on requiring background checks, including police, child protective services and Department of Motor Vehicles records, for individuals in contact with children. The SCF vows to "urge all nonprofit agencies in Fairfield County to conduct national criminal background checks on every prospective employee and volunteer who will work with children and to include information about background checks on their printed material, Web sites, and in the volunteer listings they submit to newspapers." In addition, the SCF will urge media sources "to publish only those volunteer listings that mention background check."
Freshmen Stefanie Jimenez and Deanna Fields are both members of the Peace Project. Fields explained why she chose to join. "Everybody's doing clubs, but Peace Project is more hands-on." She added that she liked the fact that students, rather than adults, make the decisions and do the work for the Peace Project.
Jimenez added, "We're just representing and helping our communities so they get better."
BMHS is the headquarters of the Center for Youth Leadership. Bob Kocienda, the adviser for the Peace Project and SCF, has been working with the student groups for eight years. The students really run the show, he said. "The famous line they use is that I just bring the food," he joked. "They run all the meetings and make all the policy and funding decisions, everything. I just ask prompting questions."
The Peace Project and SCF are each run by a group of five students who serve as executive committees. SCF has 115 members and the Peace Project has 60.