A gender study of the social representations of dating violence in Chilean adolescents

The experiences and viewpoints of adolescents as regards dating violence in southern countries remain poorly documented. It is thus difficult to have an overall understanding of the phenomenon. Based on social representation theory, this paper attempts to fill this gap by answering the question: What is dating violence for Chilean adolescents? Knowing what adolescents consider to be dating violence and the contextual elements that influence their perceptions is essential to developing effective prevention strategies. This is particularly important as prevention policies are currently non-existent in Chile, despite the fact that adolescents living there must deal with many risk factors. In this context, a qualitative multi-methodological study (free association and focus groups) was conducted with 142 Chilean adolescents from public and private schools. This study showed that the explanations of dating violence given by boys and girls were influenced by gender and a context of ambivalent sexism. It also took place in a changing socio-cultural Chilean context. Dating violence used by boys was driven by machismo and its exercise by girls was perceived to come from cultural changes concerning women’s rights. In addition, the physical nature of dating violence was deeply entrenched in the study participants’ social representations, the figurative image being hits. Based on these results, we recommend that future research and prevention strategies should consider the sociocultural context and gender as aspects likely to influence both the adolescents’ social representations of dating violence and their behaviors.