No Visible Bruises: What We Don’t Know About Domestic Violence Can Kill Us

by Rachel Louise Snyder

Rosenthal had just finished a listening tour called Youth Leads in high schools around the United States when she met me for lunch one day to talk about the broad view of all this. The aim of the listening tour, she said, was to try to determine best practices for addressing teen dating violence. A 2017 report from the Centers for Disease Control found that more than eight million girls experienced rape or intimate partner violence before the age of eighteen; for boys, the number was about half that.19 Experts across the field note that the time to address dating violence starts as young as sixth and seventh grade. Rosenthal told me that in her sessions with high schoolers, she found herself heartened by the way young people, especially young men, talked about issues of domestic and sexual violence. “These young guys have a very different relationship to each other and to women,” she said, comparing them to elder generations. “They have a lot of questions themselves about it … They’re not going to let their peers engage [in sexual violence] without some sort of confrontation.”