Monroe groups aim to show girls how to date healthy/safely

Thursday night at Madisonville's Teen Club, it's a conversation the Executive Director of Monroe County's Health Council is sharing with a group of about half a dozen Sequoyah high school girls.

They're talking about dating, relationships, and where to draw the line between love, obsession, jealously, and control.

"The goal is to decrease and create awareness that dating violence does exist and that teens need to be looking out for warning signs. Healthy and unhealthy warning signs," Ferran Kefauver, the Executive Director of Monroe County's Health Council said.

It's a conversation many parents aren't having with their children. Teen relationships are a lot different today than they were just one decade ago. Cell phones, the internet, and other technology have given the dating game a revised rules.

"They (parents) might not talk with their kids and let them know, jealousy is a problem, if he's looking through your text messages or something. They don't think to say those things to their kids because maybe they didn't deal with it," Kefauver said.

Monroe County has the highest teen pregnancy rate in East Tennessee. Kefauver says teens carrying babies is also a tell-tale sign of abusive relationships. The two have a very high correlation.

Now, the health council is meeting with teen girls around the county having these conversations. At times, they're discussing healthy dating and relationships with children as young as 11 and 12 years old.

This year alone, Monroe County has 13 and 14 year olds who are pregnant.

"Because the teen pregnancy is starting younger and younger and kids are getting into more in-depth relationships younger and younger. Kids are talking about sex younger than they ever have before," Kefauver said.

Nationwide, 1 in 3 teenage girls is the victim of some form of abuse by a partner they're dating, according to the National Council on Crime.

"They really don't know these things are unhealthy because they equate jealousy with love and they equate violence and all these things with love, because that's what we're telling them," Kefauver said. "Media, their friends, and everyone else."

Still, in just an hour, even Kefauver admits, it's tough to change a teenager's perception.

"Maybe one kid, most probably not. But maybe that one kid the lightbulb will click on and they'll think "oh I'm in an unhealthy relationship'," she said.