43% of College Women Experience Violence and Abusive Dating Behaviors
Love is Not Abuse, a program of our founding sponsor Liz Claiborne, has revealed the findings of their recent study of dating abuse among college students. The results? Dating violence and abuse among college students is more prevalent on college campuses than previously believed.
The survey, “Liz Claiborne Inc.’s Love Is Not Abuse 2011 College Dating Violence and Abuse Poll,” was conducted by Knowledge Networks to address the lack of data on dating violence and abuse among college students. Knowledge Networks interviewed 508 college students including 330 women and 178 men for the study.
According to the findings, a significant number of college women are victims of dating violence.
- 43% of dating college women report experiencing abusive dating behaviors including physical, sexual, tech, verbal or controlling abuse.
- Nearly 1 in 3 (29%) college women say they have been in an abusive dating relationship.
- More than half (57%) of college students who report experiencing dating violence said it occurred in college.
The results also show that college students generally do not know how to help their friends, or themselves, get out of abusive relationships.
- 58% of college students say they don’t know how to help someone who is a victim of dating abuse.
- 38% of college students say they don’t know how to get help for themselves if they were a victim of dating violence.
While many of the controlling behaviors overlap between high school and college students, other behaviors are specific to college students. For example, 11% of respondents were prevented from going to study groups, 8% were told whether to live on or off campus and 7% were told exactly which classes to take.
What We Are Doing to End College Dating Abuse
We at loveisrespect are moved by these findings. We’ve collaborated with our partners at Break the Cycle to bring you the tools you need to identify college dating abuse and address it at your school.
It’s time for a safer campus.
Look to the right of this post. We’ve added brand-new sections to arm you with knowledge. You can download the Liz Claiborne Inc. study, plan your safety, find info for helping a friend and brainstorm ideas to end violence at your school. We encourage you to download and spread these documents around your campus.
Teachers and parents — are you looking for a way to teach dating abuse info to your college students? The Love Is Not Abuse college curriculum is available online, free at www.loveisnotabuse.com/web/guest/curriculum.
Still have questions? As always, we’re here to talk. 1-866-331-9474
It’s worse than it is in high school but then violent and abusive dating behaviors get worse once women start graduating college and entering into good-paying jobs. It’s just a way to prevent women from succeeding and being better than men.
When ‘abuse’ is defined to include violence along with verbal abuse and the very vague ‘controlling’ it really invalidates the study and counts as misinformation, Many women think ‘oh yeah he swore at me once when we were arguing and he said I couldn’t hang out with my ex, so yeah that counts as abusive and controlling. And no similar study of men’s experiences for comparison? Without knowing how many men report violence, verbal abuse or controlling behaviour, this is pointless and promotes the image of men as abusers, yet again.
Doesn’t this mean that 43% of the women surveyed chose to be with men who were violent and abusive?
Or are they saying these women were forced to date violent and abusive men?
How does that happen on such a large scale?
What if it bf I’s being obsessed with you and he’s ou of school and ur still in highschool?