Dating violence amongst youth in a post pandemic context in Chile

Abstract

There is a scarcity of studies around dating violence, possibly due to the difficulty among young people to identify that they are victims of abuse. Young people who tend to normalize these practices are more at risk of facing greater physical and/or sexual abuse in the future. Recently, there has been an increase in violence rates, so it is necessary to explore factors that predispose to the development of violence in young couples in order to prevent it. In the present work, the CADRI questionnaire was used amongst university and technical training students, to investigate levels of sexual, relational, verbal-emotional, physical and threatening violence, in 294 young people between 18 and 30 years of age. Based on the results, it can be concluded that there is dating violence in both men and women, with women being the most perpetrators of verbal-relational violence and men of sexual violence. In all variables of received violence, women exhibited higher scores. A difference was observed in the levels of violence depending on age, duration of the relationship and young people’s educational level.