Summary: <br> <br> <br> <br> <br> <br> <br> <br> <br> <br> <br> <br> <br> Teens are driving, dating and having experiences that help them mature and grow. But what happens if they experience an abusive relationship? Sid, daughter of the founder of Educate and Empower Kids, a non-profit that provides education for parents to teach their kids great online habits and healthy ways of interacting with each other, shares her experience with dating abuse.<br> <br> She states,<br> "Our relationship seemed really perfect for the first month. David would send me poems and he’d call me each night and tell me how amazing I was. He dressed nicely and spoke well of others. He was close with his family and a strong member of the church, and he was smooth and ideal and just kind of the perfect social media looking boyfriend. I thought that I had really found someone I could date for a long, long time, even forever until I found out that he had been lying to me about some things.<br> <br> The first big lie, he didn’t really seem to care, and he kept making excuses until I would threaten to break up with him. It wasn’t really that I meant for it to be a threat, it was more like I told him that I was uncomfortable with that. He had told me that he hadn’t had sex before, but the truth was that he had, and I was worried that he would lie to me again. It wasn’t necessarily that he had done that before, it was just that he told me a completely different story. He fabricated this whole lie around it.<br> <br> He practically begged for me to stay with him. He cried and made me feel really guilty like it was at fault. So, we stayed together, and we began to, I guess, repair the relationship but it wasn’t really repairing it."<br> Teen Dating Violence Is Real<br> Sid goes on to explain,<br> "I really didn’t even want to do anything that would resemble any sort of sexual act. I was only fine with kissing or like snuggling. On the phone is how it began. He would mention to me like: Oh, I want to do this to you and he would insert some sort of sexual act. I would tell him: Okay, you can make jokes about that I guess on the phone since it seems like you’re already doing that, but I would appreciate if you make it clear to me that you don’t really want to do that. I don’t want to do that.<br> <br> He would say something like: Oh, well, you’ll come along or like: Oh, you’ll want to later on. So, it kind of put the idea in my head: Oh, well maybe I’m supposed to do those things, and I knew it was wrong from a church standpoint and from my standards, but it was hard because he would talk to me like that so much and I would definitely feel like I had to or like he didn’t feel like I loved him enough if I didn’t do that. There were a few different times where in my car before I dropped him off at home and we would be kissing and then he would kind of try to move his hand somewhere and I would move it away at first, but he would try again. It just felt like he kept trying every single time that he had a moment that he could.<br> <br> So, eventually, I would just slowly let it happen. Just these little things would slip, and I think the worst time that it happened when there was real sexual coercion going on would be a few months in. We were kissing and then I remember telling him no. He had started to take off some of my clothing and then he was trying to put his hands in places where I didn’t want and I told him no out loud, and he pretended like he didn’t hear me, and so I said it again and I pushed him off of me, and I started to cry because it had really scared me.<br> <br> He stopped and automatically he said he was sorry and that he just didn’t hear me, but there was this feeling in my gut that I just kind of knew that he had heard me. I knew that I had said it loud enough and that he was close enough that he had to have heard me.
