“My man lists himself as single on Facebook even though we have been dating for weeks. Is that cool?”
“This girl in school goes with a lot of guys. Now everyone calls her a rat. Is that cool?”
“My boyfriend cheated on me. When my friends found out they started trashing his Facebook wall. Is that cool?”
These are some of the questions the Hkupwithrespect, a social networking site that asks kids to rate as “cool”, “not cool,” or “whatever.”
The questions are written by and for teens and are just one of the tools the program Start Strong Rhode Island — with the help of teens in Young Voices — is using to teach kids to date with respect.
The site also includes a video component, Hook Up with KP, where teens head to the busy Kennedy Plaza bus station in Providence and ask fellow teens to answer similar relationship questions, and post their answers online. (see photo below)
Like many of his peers who grew up in a rough neighborhood in Providence, Chace Baptista not only heard about domestic violence, he witnessed it firsthand.
Baptista, now 24, remembers seeing loved ones “get into fights and it was really intense. We had the cops come to my house and everything,” he recalls to Tonic. “It was really important to me to break the cycle.”
With the help of some dedicated mentors, Baptista did break the cycle, and now he has dedicated his career to helping other teens break it, too.
In 2006, Baptisa co-founded Young Voices, a nonprofit organization aimed to educate and empower urban youth to become community leaders who advocate for issues important to teens throughout Rhode Island — everything from improving education to curbing teen dating violence, a particularly important topic in October, AKA Domestic Violence Awareness Month.
To address domestic violence specifically, Young Voices partnered with Start Strong Rhode Island, one of 11 projects around the country funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to form community-based solutions to teen dating violence. Almost all the teens in the Start Strong Rhode Island program are members of Young Voices, and the group has chosen to concentrate on battling domestic violence through creative digital solutions, to help kids figure out appropriate dating behavior in the real and virtual worlds.
“We’re seeing the same bullying and control dynamics as before, but with these new technologies they’re now just bigger and faster. It’s the same stuff on steroids,” explains Kate Reilly, director of Start Strong Rhode Island, who points to the deaths of Rutgers student Tyler Clementi and Massachusetts high school student Phoebe Prince as examples of how these new technologies can have tragic results.
With the help of mentors like Baptista, the students taking part in Start Strong Rhode Island have come up with a few interesting ways to educate folks on issues surrounding domestic violence and appropriate dating behavior. For instance:
The group doesn’t just help teens. Passport2SocialMedia hosts a series of community-based workshops for parents to learn about social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter so they can better understand how their teenagers are communicating with one another.
And, Healthy Teens, the working title of a video game, is being developed for teens to learn about dating violence. The game, which is in beta now and is expected to be released next spring, has kids control an avatar as they complete quests and develop skills to curb teen dating disasters.
All these projects have already had an impact on Alex Lilly, 16, who told Tonic he feels empowered thanks to his work with Young Voices and the Start Strong program.
“I had kind of a sheltered upbringing and never experienced domestic violence or knew anyone around me who had,” says Alex. “Now, if I see people in a bad situation, I know what to say to help them.”
In this confusing digital age, domestic violence can be so much more than a physical attack. Luckily, Start Strong Rhode Island and folks like Baptista and the teens in Young Voices are helping young people navigate the already-complicated dating world to make sure they are truly starting strong — and safe.
First photo by Ben Pollard via Wikimedia Commons. Second photo featuring Chace Baptista (l) and Alex Lilly (r) courtesy of Start Strong Rhode Island.