Teenage relationship abuse remains hidden in safeguarding practice, argues independent reviewer Donna Ohdedar, who challenges practitioners and leaders to explore whether they would be able to recognise the problem.
By Donna Ohdedar
When we talk about domestic abuse, most of us picture an adult relationship, a woman and a male partner, most often.
How often do we stop and consider that the person experiencing coercion, control, sexual violence or physical violence might be 15, 16 or 17 years old?
I have spent over fifteen years leading independent reviews into cases where systems missed what was in front of them. We are at real risk of that happening now.
The scale of teenage relationship abuse
In 2024, the Youth Endowment Fund surveyed 10,387 children aged 13 to 17 across England and Wales, 27% of whom had been in a romantic relationship in the previous year.
Of this group, 49% had experienced some form of violent or controlling behaviour from a partner, with 46% having experienced controlling behaviour and 31% some form of physical or sexual violence:
- One in five said they had been pressured or forced into sexual activity against their will;
- 19% had been physically assaulted;
- 17% had had explicit images or videos of themselves shared online without their consent;
- 27% said they had been made to feel afraid to disagree with their partner, and
- 26% said their partner had made them feel scared to break up with them.
Those aged 13 to 15 were significantly more likely to report these experiences than older teens.
These are children, describing behaviours that anyone working in domestic abuse or safeguarding would immediately recognise as coercion and control if an adult described them. So why do we not always recognise them here?
How language acts as a barrier to recognition
I think language matters enormously in this.
We hear a young person described as having a “difficult boyfriend”. We talk about “toxic teenage relationships”, or say two young people are “constantly falling out”.
We hear that one is checking the other’s phone, demanding to know where they are, becoming jealous when they spend time with friends, or repeatedly messaging them, and we can find ourselves reaching for words like “drama”, “jealousy” or “inexperience”.
Our society has absorbed a narrative about teenage relationships that acts as a genuine barrier to recognition. If we are only listening out for the language we associate with adult domestic abuse, we will miss it when it is happening between two teenagers, even when the behaviour itself is identical.
Their online world is not separate from their offline one
When we explore domestic abuse involving young people, we have to understand their online world alongside their offline one. They are not two separate things to be assessed in turn.
A young person’s partner is present with them in their bedroom, through their phone. They can know where their partner is, see when they are online, demand photographs, message them repeatedly, threaten to share intimate images, and monitor who they are speaking to, all of it possible twenty four hours a day.
Existing good practice
It is pleasing to note that there is strong practice already out there to learn from. From 2020-22, a coalition of charities, led by SafeLives, ran the Your Best Friend project, designed to help young people understand each other’s relationships and builds their knowledge and confidence to spot abuse in a friend’s relationship. Young people are often the first to notice, long before any professional does.
Leicestershire’s Police and Crime Commissioner has commissioned Go-Getta CIC & H.O.P.E Training & Leadership to deliver coercive control awareness workshops to young people across Leicester, Leicestershire and Rutland from July 2026-27. The project is designed to helping them recognise early warning signs, understand consent and boundaries, challenge the normalisation of harmful attitudes among peers and on social media, and know how to access support safely.
Teenage relationship abuse tends to develop gradually and go unrecognised, by young people themselves and by the adults around them. Work like this is about building the knowledge and confidence to spot the pattern before it takes hold.
Would you recognise coercive control of a teenager?
This is the question I would ask any team, any panel, any individual practitioner to sit with: if a teenager experiencing coercive control came into contact with your service tomorrow, would you recognise it?
I use this question in my own analysis and in the reviews I lead, because it forces us past the assumptions that we might make.
If you manage a team, I would encourage you to ask that question directly in supervision and in case audits. Look at the language being used in your own case recordings. Notice where “toxic relationship” might be masking coercive control. Build in the online dimension as standard, not as an afterthought once something has gone wrong offline.
The children in that Youth Endowment Fund research are not describing a different phenomenon to the one we already understand. They are describing the same behaviours, in a context we are not yet fully trained to see. That gap is closeable. It starts with the question I keep coming back to: would you recognise it?
Donna Ohdedar is the founder of Review Consulting, an independent review consultancy specialising in child safeguarding practice reviews, safeguarding adults reviews and domestic abuse related death reviews, and has led over 250 reviews since 2009.
Source: Community Care
