Yamini Ranjan talks with Dr. Malcom Astley – teen dating violence prevention activist whose
teen daughter Lauren was murdered by her ex-boyfriend

YR:     Good things come in small packages. Tiny five-foot-tall Lauren had a lot of personality and a beautiful voice. She was born to Malcolm Astley and Mary Dunne in Wayland, Massachusetts. Her life was cut short by violence. Her ex-boyfriend Nathaniel Fujita also known as “Nate” murdered Lauren on July 3, 2011, a crime for which he was convicted and imprisoned for life.

After her passing, her parents started the Lauren Dunne Astley Memorial Fund to provide education about teen violence, in other words, dating and breakup violence. I find that as we grow and become more mature, we stop confiding in our parents. According to www.iloverespect.org, only 33% of teens in abusive relationships tell someone.

MA: Overall, she would share a great deal with me, even hard things and lean on me when something hard would happen but not always. She was also very independent and probably a little too confident. That’s a hard balance to get right.

I don’t think that I was as alert as I would be now. Partly I want to pass on my alertness to others as Lauren’s mother is good at doing. The most dangerous times in relationships are around breakups. Not every breakup is dangerous, but you want to be alert early on to teach the foundation.
           
You don’t see a former partner alone. It’s not your job if you decide that you need to leave a partner. It’s not your job to look after their needs.

People need to be sensitive when they hear about a breakup. Are there needs there? Who can best meet those needs? Having those teams in place is what humans do; they come together, and they break apart.

YR: Ending a relationship is one of the most painful of human experiences.

MA: A psychiatrist friend said that all relationships end in either breakups, divorce or death. That is the hard, hard course of being human that we don’t quite let people in on so that we have the strength to face it together. We need to help them right from the start. It’s so important that we have safe places to grieve supportively together, to treasure what still exists, to treasure what we remember. These are some of the skills that I’m trying to ensure partly through our foundation that we teach our youth much sooner in life.

YR: The Lauren Dunne Astley Memorial Fund educates teens about many at-risk emotions. Shame is perhaps the most important of them. Often as described by Brene’ Brown, people think of themselves as the mistake not as having made the mistake. This emotion cuts across all sorts of “isms” as Malcolm talks about and often shows up in breakups.

MA: To do a shame analysis for every person would be a good part of the tasks. They will change from year to year. I had done numerous initiatives in that regard against racism, against sexism, against lots of “isms.” This whole situation has been an opportunity to examine the many common themes of the “isms.” It goes back to shame and to people striving to feel valued. Each of us wants to be seen as effective and loveable and when we don’t feel that way, pain can cause corrosive shame.

We need a certain amount of shame to become civilized, but it’s very easy for it to get out of hand. I call it one of the at-risk emotions. There may be 12 of them that we need to do a much better job of focusing on helping our young people understand, name and cope with both in themselves and in others. It shows up in breakups. I believe it was operating in my daughter’s death.

YR:  Do you think along with the kids, adults should also be given some sort of training in understanding the signs and finding the resources on how to communicate with a child who is showing signs of distress?

MA: Approach young parents early on about these matters is a very important road that we can go down together. With our approach, we’re trying to build a skyscraper from the roof on down. That doesn’t work very well, but it’s what we can do for now.
           
Our curriculum is aimed at one high school class period, the Love to Death curriculum aimed at juniors and Escalation developed by the One Love Foundation.
           
They tried to develop it for college and university students who affirmed it but said they needed to hear it before they got to college.

YR: Videos, stories, comics, Love to Death workshops, all these methods are wonderful and work efficiently in conveying the message.
           
One thing that has really intrigued me whenever I watch sports on TV is the aggressiveness of sports. I asked Malcolm about what the role of macro factors such as win/lose culture in sports in school and even in life in general in our society have done to the work of the Lauren Dunne Astley Memorial Fund.
           
Malcolm is quick and on point to recognize the impact of this culture on men and other genders too. He underlines the importance of not winning but rather being resilient meaning adjusting adapting and being productive in new environments. That resilience should be foundational in our education.

MA: Back to our search to feel competent and valued. If a loss means a lack of value, then that creature of over shame can appear and lead to major destabilization, a major weakening of our sense of resilience, but if your core is being defined by winning and losing, which sports easily tends to do, then we’re in real trouble whenever there is a loss.

The whole concept of being a loser has major impact on our culture at this time. Underneath it is the striving to be competent and to be seen as valuable. If we can get those out in the open and identify the many ways that people can be competent and for the many genders that we are now finally becoming aware of, these things get complicated. There will continue to be identity crises, but we can learn to cope with and face up to them. Those are some things that I think can help boys break out of the man box, as Tony Porter says, which keeps boys and men tightly isolated.

Yamini Ranjan talks with Jessica Teperow, Director of prevention programs at REACH Massachusetts

YR: Why do you think teens generally don’t have a good idea of what healthy relationships look like?

JT:  I think a lot of adults don’t know what healthy relationships look like. I think for young people, they don’t have the benefits of lived experience yet, so they tend to look to different sources to give them information.

One big source of information for all of us shapes a lot of young people’s understanding of relationships and expectations has to do with the media, both social media but also looking at television shows and movies, even books. By and large, if you look at popular media and the way that relationships are portrayed, the images that we’re given of what love looks like is not the way that I would define or describe a healthy relationship, but they are celebrated.
           
If I’m a young person and I’m starting to explore romantic relationships and I have one who wants to get very intense with me very quickly who is very jealous if I talk to other people, if I have friends and family express concern and my partner says, “They don’t understand. It’s us against the world.” I may feel like this is what romance is because this is how I see romance portrayed.
           
The media does a great job of teaching a lot of really unhealthy behaviors and calling them love. Jealousy is a great one that we see as a warning sign because jealousy can often be connected to controlling behavior, but a lot of people feel like jealousy is a way to express how much you care about a person.
           
The other source that young people look to is their peers. This is part of why educating young people early and also helping them have these conversations with each other is so important. While it’s important that all the adults in their lives are giving really consistent and health messages about relationships, we also know that they are very influenced by what their peers are saying and doing as well.

YR: The name of the program is REACH. How does it help reach young people?

JT: The full title of our organization is REACH Beyond Domestic Violence. REACH is an acronym which stands for Refuge, Education, Advocacy and Change. It inspires both a recognition of the inclusivity of this issue, but it also has a message of reaching towards or reaching beyond and I think it demonstrates a real commitment of the organization to prevention. Prevention isn’t just what we want to stop happening but what we are working towards. What do we hope to create or foster?
           
In terms of young people, I think that we’ve got to give young people a lot of credit. They are incredibly wise. They know a lot about their own lives. They also know a lot about their peers. I think a lot of young people are really looking to have conversations about relationships to help them build skills.

YR:     I want to know about how as a victim people just don’t realize that they are being abused. How do you tell people when they don’t know themselves that they are in an abusive relationship? How do we help victims in such a situation?

JT:  I think what you just described is really common. If I have never had a formal class or workshop on domestic violence then my understanding might come from the way I’ve seen it depicted in the news, the way I’ve seen it on shows like Law and Order or the way I hear my friends and family talk about it. A lot of the ways that it is portrayed in the news is with two predominant narratives.
           
The first narrative is tragic stories that we hear of domestic violence homicide where people never saw it coming. They were the perfect couple. The abuser was not just well-liked, but beloved by the community. The storyline often becomes a great relationship, a great person who one day just snapped. That’s often how the abuser will describe why they did what they did. “I lost my mind. I was so jealous. I flew into a rage.” What that storyline gives us is a very counternarrative to the definition that I shared. It’s a story of losing control not of having control.
           
The other narrative that we see a lot in fictionalized media that is really powerful in shaping people’s understanding of domestic violence is what I call the “monster myth,” where people who perpetrate harm are depicted in very overt, obvious ways. Ominous music is played when they come into a room. They smile too long in a creepy way.
           
The people who create these kinds of shows and movies send a lot of really subtle messages to the audience that gives them the signals to know who the bad guy is. The main characters of the show don’t discover who the bad guy is for some time which leaves a lot of us feeling like we’re really good at spotting abusers. We always know who it is well before the detectives figure it out 25 minutes later.
           
That allows us to believe that abusers are easy to spot, that they are unlikable, that they are people who are overtly causing harm in lots of places and spaces. How that then affects victims’ perceptions or survivors’ perceptions of their own relationships, very often there is a feeling of knowing that certain behavior is not okay or is abusive, but it’s okay because they are not a bad person. Abusers are bad people.
           
Abuse often follows a pattern like a wave. There are really, really good times, but then there are really bad and scary times. Survivors often look at the good times as the real relationship and the bad times as these exceptions that they feel responsible for because an abuser is really adept at blaming everyone but themselves. A survivor is working overtime during those periods of calm to try to prevent the next period of intensity.
           
I think there is also a misconception that abuse is only physical. If I am experiencing abuse but it’s not leaving bruises or physical signs of harm, then maybe it’s not really abuse. Again, abusers will use that to their advantage by saying, “I never laid a hand on you.” I think this important to understand.
           
I think it’s really hard to label our own experiences with a term like “abuse” because it carries so much weight. Many survivors say for a lot of different reasons including they may really love the person and because there are periods where things get better, they may really believe that the relationship can get better, that the bad times with dissipate or even go away all together.
           
It can be hard to identify for ourselves if we don’t have a deeper understanding of abuse really being about power and control. It’s intentional that someone makes you feel like you’re crazy and that the person doing that is someone you love and someone who says they love you. There can be the shame of “How did I let this happen to me?” There can be a lot of barriers to someone in a relationship being abused to identifying it as abuse.

Yamini Ranjan talks with Nicole Daley, Director of the Division of Violence and
Injury Prevention at the MA Department of Public Health

YR: I want to get into the details of how these in school programs are able to make a difference. How do they sound? What are they really like?

ND: I think in school programs are so important because young people are spending a large percentage of their time there. Friendships happen at school, which are such a critical piece of their development.

When you have a really good program, having good materials like movies and things that young people can talk about are important. It’s hard in a school setting for teens to open up personally about what might be going on in their relationships, but it is really easy for them to talk about the relationship they see on the screen or in the case of Malcolm Astley, what happened to his daughter.
             
I think it’s really important for in school programs to be relevant. The ones that are done really well like The One Love Foundation, the Lauren Dunne Astley Foundation, those make the issue seem realistic, but they also don’t make them sensational.
           
That’s what’s really important because a young person has to be able to see themselves in that relationship. They have to see their world, where they come from and how the couple is working through issues. That gives them a sense of what healthy relationships looks like and what unhealthy relationships look like.
           
Programs that allow young people to explore and ask questions like the Start Strong program at the Boston Public Health Commission where they base their learning on asking teens questions; “Why do you think that?” “Is going through someone’s phone a sign of a healthy relationship?” Starting to unpack questions. I think young people really gravitate towards that. They don’t gravitate towards programs that tell them what to do and how to do it. They gravitate towards exploration. We are on this journey together to understand what healthy relationships are.

YR:  You spoke about the Start Strong program that you oversaw when you were at the Boston Public Health Commission. What makes this program impactful?

ND:  I think what makes the Start Strong program really impactful is the youth-centered approach. As they design all the next iterations of their program, it comes from talking with peer leaders in the program about what’s going on in the lives of young people. What are the trends amongst peers? Those conversations really help Start Strong to be on the cutting edge of having those types of conversations that could help move the needle for young people.
           
Also, the promotions that they do to get the word out about teen dating violence is a peer-led model. Peer leaders facilitate the conversations, not just the adult leaders. It’s the high school age peer leaders who talk to their peers about the topic.

YR: Tell us about how inclusive these programs are.

ND:  I would say that the field has come a long way from when I started. We always recognize that teen dating violence can happen in any relationship, LGBTQIA, couples, straight couples. I don’t think that there was as much content for LGBTQIA young people, but I know that the field has moved further in that direction.
           
A lot of times when we talk about couples, we’ll use the word “partner.” We’ve been creating more visual media that is reflective of LGBTQIA couples and what might feel uniquely different for them.
           
As we’ve moved forward, we come leaps and bounds in talking with young people who might identify as queer who say, “We recognize this.” There is also a bigger barrier for them.
           
If you’re 14 years old, this is your first relationship and it’s unhealthy, you may not have been fully out to your parents. Now you’re stuck in this relationship because you’re scared to come out to them.
           
You might be in a small community where there are not as many friends who identify as LGBTQIA and wondering if you’ll lose all your friends if you break up with this person.
           
There are some things that are really unique to young people who are LGBTQIA and we’re doing a better job of having those conversations.

YR: What are some of the challenges and problems that you face in adoption and execution of these programs in schools?

ND: Some of the biggest issues that we face with schools is the bandwidth. Teachers are carrying so much. We try to understand when in the school year these programs can be conducted, and which teachers have the bandwidth.
           
One year we might have a champion teacher who wants to roll this out across the seventh grade, but the next year there may be competing interests or that teacher may have left the school. There can be a lot of challenges with working with the school community year after year to make sure that the program is codified.
           
When we think about young people and where they are in their lives, getting to enough young people to make sure that the messaging resonates. If there are just a few students who hear the message but there is so much other noise, reality TV shows, things that have glorified unhealthy relationships that they are constantly being exposed to, so it’s really hard to get to that saturation point to make them realize that there are alternatives and healthy relationship models that they can build their life around.

YR: Are you still adding new things into the programs?

ND: Yes, it’s constantly evolving. When we first started the work, there was a heavy focus on music, the nutrition label because we were thinking about the messaging in music. It was designed with our first director Casey Corcoran and the idea was that we know the content of our food. Not all food is bad. How we know that and make those decisions for ourselves is by looking at a nutrition label. He had the idea and we worked together on the content.
           
For example, there are so many songs that seem like the most amazing love songs, but when you actually listen to the lyrics you realize that they have gone awry. The first time we did the relationship nutrition label, Bruno Mars was really popular. That’s when he first came out. Bruno Mars has amazing love songs.
             
When we first did the relationship nutrition label, the way it was broken up is that there were five healthy relationship ingredients and five unhealthy relationship ingredients. One of the unhealthy relationship ingredients is obsession. Another unhealthy relationship ingredient is when the relationship only equals sex. Another bad ingredient is jealousy. We had these pieces.

Because Bruno Mars was so popular and he had all these amazing love songs, when we actually applied the relationship nutrition label and talked about the lyrics, we realized that he is a little obsessive, “I’ll catch a grenade for you.” Those are myths in media. If a person is obsessed with you and showing up at your doorstep and professing to sacrifice themselves, that’s love in media but in real life if that person is not letting you walk out the door to have another relationship, that’s when it’s unhealthy. Unpacking what love really is versus what is put across as love is really important. Sorry Bruno.