by Elisa Scarton, VicHealth and Youth Central Roving Reporter.

Ahhhh, young love. Isn’t it great?

Well, no, not always.

First love can be awkward, embarrassing, confusing, frustrating, controlling and more often than not, ends badly.

Amelia, 21, met her first boyfriend when she was 15 and says she wishes she could forget it ever happened.

“I was so vindictive. I cut all ties with my best friend because I thought she was trying to steal him. I was paranoid,” she said.

Louise, 18, was pressured into sleeping with her first boyfriend weeks after she turned 14.

“Throughout our relationship, I was always convinced I was pregnant. He refused to use protection and I was too weak to say anything. I was infatuated with him and wanted a boyfriend more than anything.”

For some, the repercussions of a toxic first love can linger for years after the relationship ends. Michelle, 23, is still dealing with the consequences of her first love, four years after they broke up.

“If he finds out I’m seeing someone, he’ll ring me and call me terrible names. I remind him that we’re not together anymore, but I can’t get rid of him. I feel like I owe him something because we were each other’s first,” she says.

Among the hormones, inexperience and peer pressure, young people don’t always have an easy time forming healthy relationships. But the attitudes they develop at a young age can have a lasting effect on how they treat the opposite sex.

Changing Attitudes

In 2004, the Victorian Centre Against Sexual Assault (CASA) started a peer education program in Australian secondary schools.

The initiative for the project came from the young people themselves and was aimed at developing and teaching how to have respectful relationships.

CASA recently released a report into the program. It found that while young people understood the rights and wrongs of relationships, many still harboured negative attitudes.

“Like adults, young people have an array of opinions, responses and attitudes to hearing and learning about sexual assault and violence against women,” says CASA House schools program coordinator Emma Hardley.

“But what we are continually seeing when working with young people is that gender and power play out in ways that can be incredibly unequal and harmful to girls and women,” she says.

“They grow up thinking that sexual assault, violence and harassment from men is part of ‘the lot’ of being a woman – something that we simply need to accept and ‘get over’.”

Sex, lies and dangerous behaviour  

One of the most difficult challenges faced by young people in relationships is deciding whether to have sex.

CASA’s schools report found there were strong social norms controlling a young person’s behaviour around sex and consent. For young men, this peer pressure often dictated how they communicated their desire for sex.

“A young man in one of the sessions we delivered said: ‘If girls don’t want to be raped, they shouldn’t have boyfriends’,” Ms Hardley says.

“Embedded in this statement is a false idea that boys and men cannot control themselves and that, for some young people, sex is an expected part of being in a relationship.”

In her work with students, Ms Hardley says she found most young men were too embarrassed to ask their partner if she wanted to have sex, preferring to just do it without checking what she wanted first. 

“We try to teach them that it’s not so much the absence of a ‘no’ that boys and men need to look for before engaging in sex, but the presence of a ‘yes’,” she says. 

But when it comes to sexual assault, many young people still have harmful and incorrect attitudes towards women.

“One of the most commonly held misconceptions is that what girls or women wear translates into whether or not they want to have sex – the ‘she was asking for it’ stems from this belief,” Ms Hardley says.

And it’s not just young men who hold this belief. Anecdotal evidence from CASA’s work in schools shows young women are just as likely, if not more likely, to engage in victim blaming.

Ms Hardley says young people need to be made aware that this victim-blaming attitude goes completely against the reality.  

In fact, 2004 Australian Criminology statistics show 78 per cent of sexual assault victims are known to their perpetrators and are attacked somewhere they feel safe, like their own homes.

Confused and abused

By Year 12, almost a third of sexually active Australian young women have had unwanted sex.  

Louise was one of these people.

Looking back, she says she thought her boyfriend’s behaviour was normal and a sign that he was taking their relationship seriously.

“I thought when you got into a relationship, you had sex. Girls who didn’t were called prudes and teases. I didn’t want to be called that,” she says.

“When he acted jealous or controlling, I’d actually be happy because I thought it was proof that he loved me. I was completely under his spell until he dumped me, and I was so grateful he did because I never would have been able to.”

Louise’s story isn’t all that uncommon.

That’s why the Victorian Domestic Violence Resource Centre, with support from VicHealth, developed the Love: the good, the bad and the ugly website as a tool for teaching young people how to have a healthy relationship.

VicHealth’s Preventing Violence Against Women Senior Project Officer Kiri Bear says many young people don’t know what a healthy relationship is and commonly confuse abusive or violent behaviour as signs of love and commitment.

“A good relationship starts with equality, both people feeling free and happy to be themselves and both openly talking about what they need. That’s what the website teaches young people,” she said.

The DVRCV collected more than 1000 stories from young people for the website. Ms Bear says the aim was to provide young people with relevant information that reflected real-life experiences.

“The website has information on how to start a good relationship and how to keep it healthy. There’s advice on how to handle the difficult parts of relationships, and finally there’s what to do if things turn violent or abusive.”

But Ms Hardley says young people also need role models at home and school to set the example for healthy relationships.

“Young people receive powerful messages from family about how to treat people and what respect looks and feels like, for better or worse,” she says.

“By engaging young people in respectful relationships education from a young age, parents and teachers can reduce the prevalence of sexual assault and gender-based violence in the future.”

For more information see www.lovegoodbadugly.com