No, It’s Not OK to Beat Upyour Girlfriend

By Bob Kerr

I was fortunate to spend a few years on the board of the Katie Brown Educational Program. It is a wonderful and very direct way to claim something positive from tragedy.

It also confronts us with a strange and scary question or two: Is it really necessary to go into schools and tell young boys that it’s wrong to beat up their girlfriends? Are the very basics of social behavior so lost in our cluttered lifestyles that what was once taught at home by example must now be taught in school by teachers?

Yes and yes. The statistics are there. They tell us of too many young boys seriously hurting the girls they supposedly care about.

Jay Schachne, a cardiologist who practices in Fall River and lives in Barrington, started looking into the growing problem after Katie Brown’s body was found in the driveway of her boyfriend’s parents’ house in the Rumstick section of Barrington more than six years ago. Katie’s parents, Larry and Georgia Brown, are close friends of Schachne.

Ronald Posner, the girl’s boyfriend, is in prison for the murder.

What Schachne learned surprised him, as it would surprise anyone who assumes that the simple essentials of civilization are still in place. He learned, among other things, that 28 percent of high school girls in the United States experience some form of dating violence.

So he started the educational program that hires and sends educators into schools to talk to kids about serious problems that they might not see as problems at all. They talk about the warning signs, about how too much attention can be a sign of something other than affection. The boy who gives his girlfriend a cell phone, then calls her every 15 minutes, is getting into dangerous territory.

Sometimes, girls talk about the violent things they let pass because they think they have to.

The program is based in Fall River. It began in fifth-grade classrooms and moved up. It has since moved into other communities, including Barrington.

The educators I’ve talked with seem smart and aware. They tell of seeing the realization come over young boys that what they’ve been doing is not normal or acceptable or cool. It is hurtful, cowardly, possibly criminal.

Some of the students who have gone through the program have agreed to put their reactions on tape. There are some frank comments on old actions seen in a whole new way.

Now, in Rhode Island, there is a proposal that schools be required to teach students about dating violence. And it is inspired by the murder two years ago of 23-year-old Lindsay Ann Burke by her former boyfriend, Gerardo Martinez, who will be sentenced for the murder Friday.

Attorney General Patrick Lynch announced the Lindsay Ann Burke Act on Thursday on behalf of the woman’s parents, Christopher and Ann Burke, of North Kingstown. In the two years since their daughter’s death, the Burkes have been encouraging high school students to discuss relationships.

The bill would require the state Department of Education and local school districts to come up with a dating-violence policy and train staff members in dating violence. It has been referred to the House Health, Education and Welfare Committee. It should not stay there long without a hearing. The problem is not getting any better. The sooner young people learn, the sooner they stop making violent mistakes.

Another senseless murder, another relationship gone terribly wrong, has led to yet another effort to show young people the dangers in the tricky crosscurrents of personal relationships. What role the Katie Brown Educational Program would play if and when the bill is passed into law in Rhode Island has yet to be determined, although one would seem a natural to assist the other.

And at the heart of the discussion is the reminder that this is one crazy, confusing time to be a kid – mixed signals coming from everywhere, the once-solid underpinnings of home and family pulled loose, a popular culture drenched in moronic excess.

It might come as a shock to most people that a lot of 16-year- old boys are backhanding a lot of 16-year-old girls. But what’s even more shocking is that somewhere in their daily lives they found something that told them it was OK.

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