To think that kids at secondary school should be taught about relationship red flags?

[toptramp]

Of all things in my life, it was my abusive relationship that almost killed me and my career. I am scarred by it and my career is no way as good as it could have been if I had seen the warning signs and ran for my life.
Moreover I am still single as I have had problems establishing them since said abuse.
I have heard that the goverment are thinking of teaching kids about dating abuse and how to avoid it? I met my abuser at the age of 16 and there was absolutely no guidance from parents or teachers on the warning signs and noone helped me get out of it even when it was obvious that I was becoming ill and damaged by it.

It is all very well having good qualifications as I do but if you meet the wrong partner, your life can get messed up pretty quickly.

Such lessons may also target potential abusers and teach them respect in relationships.

YABU

Aside from magically finding the time in a busy schedule to do this, some things should be taught at home by the family. It is not a teacher's job to raise a child, but to educate them.

Relationship advice is not education. It should be covered at home.

We could let them go on the relationships section of MN for half an hour of their ICT time.

Once a teenager falls in 'love', all sensible advice will probably go out the window anyway.

They are, or we do. A lady from a DV charity comes in during PHSE to talk to them in Y10.

Only trouble is, a lot of the kids get understandably upset with some woman coming in telling them whats what when they live in violent homes.

TBH you cant keep on expecting schools to do parents jobs. If a parent cannot reinforce the message that being struck by a partner is wrong and give a feeling of self worth to a child, how is the state expected to keep on doing a parents job?

I think it should. Both how to recognise an abusive relationship and how to recognise if you're being abusive in a relationship.

There are some projects doing work like this in schools, which is fab, but sadly not many of them.

All very well saying it should be taught at home, but the cycle of abuse continues because this kind of thing is normalised at home, so when you go into a relationship, you don't recognise the signs.

Children are leaving school still unable to read or write. We have far more pressing issues at hand.

Hmm, that's a good point trois. I wonder how it would be best to counter these messages, then? I do think it needs to come outside of the family, but without alienating those who are living in these kinds of situations already.

You sound very poorly-parented OP, and with few friends to help you gain some perspective back when you were a teenager.
Not sure a couple of PSHCE and citizenship lessons would have made a difference, it was your parents' job to care for you.

YABU... There is a limit to how much a school can deal with in terms of personal morality, self-respect, and the dangers of everyday life. They can certainly encourage discussion on ethics, philosophy and other 'what would you do' situations. School rules should cover respect for others. However, abuse is criminal behaviour and, if we could all spot criminals reliably, there wouldn't be quite so much for the police to do. If they teach children how to recognise one form of criminal behaviour, should they also alert children to the danger-signs of theft, fraud, assault, etc?

It is covered in our SRE but not to the depth we'd like due to timing constraints, we do try to highlight the different types of abusive relationships as many only think abuse= physical DV

You teach children how they should treat each other in school, the respect and the relationships with each other. It's part of safeguarding along with the anti-bullying strategies and the policies on identifying and dealing with abuse.
Sadly, what happens inside schools is often less than perfect and outside even less so.
OP, what stopped you seeing that your relationship wasn't normal and how other people conducted their relationships? Or was everyone around you in the same situation, and any alternative would have been seen as purely academic?

Anyone can see that Broken Britain is a result of devastatingly poor parenting that is affecting our generations. Both boys and girls need to be offered some boundaries. If they don't get this from home, they need to get it from schools.

Children can't play outside, the community has disintegrated, the church hasn't moved with the times and become unattractive or stifling, TV and computers are hard to beat for entertainment.

Troubled parents (and I've worked with a lot of them) tend to fall back on 'out of sight out of mind' and this is where abusive personalities pounce on their vulnerable children.

Of course schools should get involved. They can't honestly believe that teaching them the whys and wherefores of pythagoras can be more important then being able to protect yourself from the impending destruction of your live by an abuser.

I think they should cover it in PHSE, it never was when I was at school which I think is a shame , also the focus on DV- physical abuse myth should be worked on e.g talk about emotional/mental abuse more.

very, good Idea.

However these things are essentially a parents job.

I agree that children should be taught this, but I don't like the idea that it's for the school to give our children the emotional and social skills they need. I think this is a job for Mum, Dad, siblings, aunties, grandpa's, neighbours... Well everyone really. But not school. I don't want a kind of state controlled social engineering. I don't want schools telling my children what choices to make, I want to teach them myself about how to make their own choices for themselves in an informed, deliberate way. The difference is subtle but vast. If you teach them What to think you will be there until they're 75. The trick is to teach them How to think for themselves. Schools are not effective places for that kind of learning because they practice top-down authoritarianism (which is what works for academic study). You have to teach these kinds of skills from the bottom up, with one to one interaction and lots of listening to the individual child. It wouldn't work in a school setting. That said, there is no reason PSHE can't cover DV as a topic, but to really give your children the self esteem it takes to know when to walk away it takes a family, not a classroom.

I think it's the sort of thing that should start in primary school to counter the 'if you're my friend then you have to do X', which might help the later version of 'if you loved me you'd have sex with me/do whatever'.

I have to admit some of my most useful education was from the science teachers who cut out relevant advice columns from magazines and glued them round the doorways across the department -one I remember said 'Anyone who says 'if you loved me you'd have sex with me' is a) wrong and b) probably doesn't love you and just wants sex'

At least one assembly or something on signs a relationship is becoming abusive would be great, but depressingly I'm working with sixthformers who have had one half-hour lesson on sex and pregnancy and relationships and everything in their entire school careers, resulting in many babies from the mothers honestly not knowing what they were doing (apparently the words 'emergency contraception', 'morning-after pill' and 'abortion' were ones these reasonably-intelligent kids had never heard of...)

Schools are the perfect place to approach these subjects. Teaching them how to think is exactly what they do. Teaching them how to protect themselves from bullies and abusers is vital.

Teaching them how to think is different from teaching them what to think.

So long as people (all people) know or are taught where to access information to deal with situations in need.#

Most school planners have a directory of help numbers ranging from the obvious one of childline, but also drugs councellors, berevement etc - same as you find in the front of any telephone directory.

Also, at our local hospital, on the inside of every female toilet door, there is a poster with help numbers for DV - and also a box where you can leave a message if your partner is particularly controlling. the one place he cant follow you is into a ladies loo. (I wonder, do the male toilets have a similar facility?)

I think this would be a good idea for all public toilets.

I think it's a good idea, OP. I think they should discuss what a good, healthy relationship looks like and contrast that with unhealthy relationships. It should actually start in primary school, very simply with regards to friendships, as notcitrus suggests.

I disagree with those who say that there isn't enough time- I think it's one of the mst basic things that everybody should learn, and schools have to teach PSHE anyway. I do think that parents should be teaching about healthy relationships (and self-respect) but a) many parents won't or can't and b) I think teens would benefit a lot from discussing it with their peers- when it comes from parents it can easily be interpreted as 'You just don't like my bf/gf, stop telling me what to do!'.

Teaching things like this is not the job of a school.

Interesting. I have just started delivering such a course in local schools, as part of their PSHE. It is all around 'healthy' relationships and self assertiveness.

What is really depressing is that most of the students can identify what makes an unhealthy relationship- but they are much less able to give examples of good relationships

Sorry, but I think this kind of teaching should be done by parents rather than teachers.

A lot of the time, the parents themselves are/ have been in abusive relationships.

And every 14 year old seems to think they are a cross between Love's Young Dream and Romeo & Juliet. If the poor parents says anything, it's all 'You don't understand! You are trying to Stop Our LOve!'.

Discussing it with other kids and another adult who isn't so emotionally involved brings out some interesting ideas.

It is the priority of the parents but I do want my children to be educated in environments that support the moral code by which my family lives. I do think it's important for schools to reinforce the importance of kindness, of choice, of being able to say no, and to provide some sort of guidance when things are going wrong. I would hope that vulnerable children might see school as a place of safety and that sensible teachers will deal with safeguarding matters in accordance with procedure where necessary.

When I was at school we had incredibly frank discussions during RE in the upper fifth with our unmarried head teacher who spent some time as a nun and as a missionary in China. What she knew about amazed us and I still remember her sensible words 35 years later. I look back on her as an incredibly wise woman who guided us gently and taught us many life lessons far more effectively than in today's prescribed pshe curriclum. It's a shame we didn't appreciate how good she was at the time but perhaps that was part of her gift.

I think there should be some kind of guidance - targeted at both recognising the signs of abuse - and those potentially being abusive, like the Home Office advertising campaigns that are currently running in cinemas.

While yes, bringing up your child to have a healthy respect for themselves and others should be part of a parent's remit; there are other influential factors such as peer pressure, media influences, and even mainstream pornography which means teenagers are influenced into believing that they have to be submissive and say 'yes' to anything to fit in; and teen boys may feel that they have to be seen to pressure girls to say yes; that they are entitled to do this and upholds their masculinity.

However, although bringing up their child to value themselves should be instilled by parents; the fact is that this doesn't always happen for various reasons. I have escaped a violent relationship this year that put my child and myself in serious risk. It took me a long time to realise that I was abused - it may have been obvious to anyone else, but not to me. Thing is I was raised from a somewhat fundamentalist Christian upbringing and was taught from a very early age to 'turn the other cheek' to everyone, and 'forgive and forget'.

This damaged my self-esteem somewhat as it taught me that other people's feelings and happiness were more important than my own. Looking back it's not suprising that I was able to be easily manipulated by my abusive, controlling and violent husband.

However if we had covered 'red flags' in relationships - I would have remembered them from my schooldays - and I would have certainly made some different choices.

Its all well and good saying it should come from the parents but as someone who works in education, when it comes to children who are growing up in troubled homes, how can the advise come from their parents?
Therefore do you either introduce it school like we do or just leave them to it and say tough luck if your parent's can't do it. That would just compound the likelyhood of the negative situations being repeated in the childs life as they grow up.