gender violence

Adolescence is a key stage in the development of girls and young boys. In this age when socialization intensifies outside of your family and in not very close environments, with others and other young people, in groups, in pairs, it is very necessary to draw attention to those issues that may pose a danger if not they become visible and measures are taken that lead to maintaining positive relationships based on equality.

Young girls need guidance to know how to detect in relationships, those behaviors that they believe are "normal" or that they value positively as "samples of love and / or friendship" and that, on the contrary, involve risks because they are controlling attitudes and being based on inequality between the sexes.

The reality of gender violence shows us again urgent situations to be addressed. The statistics on murders and denunciations are showing a clear decrease in age, so that more and more young girls are involved in forms of violence that they do not know how they started and find it hard to break. This situation places us in the field of prevention, in the field of coeducation as an intervention line to eradicate and / or at least reduce those forms of sexist violence that are within reach.

We must bear in mind that gender violence in adolescence can be different than in adulthood, it acquires dimensions according to the socialization received, to the concrete moment of life, to the social representations that are being forged, to social transformations ... thus, the measures taken for their treatment must have the possible differences that generate and sustain them. Another issue that we must not forget is that gender violence can appear in all social classes, places of origin, sexual identities ... that is, presented in multiple ways and in different scenarios.

The concept of "romantic love," as we have said, is not something alien to gender socialization, but rather, driven and sustained by it. The social construction of this type of love has been forged from the patriarchal, from the spheres of power, being its bases: gender inequalities, discrimination against women, the submission of these, heterosexuality as the only form of affective relationship -sexual ... among many other things.