It’s Always the Boyfriend: On Domestic Violence and Young Adult Fiction

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Statically speaking, when someone hurts a woman, her intimate partner, whether current or former, is the most likely culprit. We don’t protect teenage girls from this reality, either. They’re exposed to its foundations during one of the most emotionally vulnerable periods of their life: middle school and high school. Experiencing first love and first heartbreak might be considered canon events when it comes to growing up, but so is experiencing the first time the person you like pressures you into doing something you’re not ready to do; the first time you reject an advance; the first time you are punished for rejecting an advance, whether that is socially, emotionally, or physically.

Dating is a large part the social currency in high school, because high school is a microcosm of our patriarchal society. The male gaze has currency because we’ve decided it has currency. Who you date—and if you date—means something. Being the only girl without a date at a school dance/the only girl without a boyfriend/the only girl who isn’t ‘experienced’, etc., can cost you social currency. And suddenly a girl might find herself feeling pressured to say yes to a boy who she innately doesn’t want to be with just to fit in.

There’s the flipside of this coin, too: being seen as a boy who can’t ‘get’ a girl (as if a girl is something to ‘get,’ like a prize) can be equally as mortifying and even emasculating. It doesn’t help that over the last few years, we’ve seen a rise in the backlash to the #MeToo movement. Men like Andrew Tate gained a following by targeting impressionable young men to groom. At the heart of their messaging is entitlement: that men are entitled to women and their entitlement trumps all. It all sounds very Handmaid’s Tale but it is certainly not fringe and it is certainly not new, though perhaps it is bolder. This kind of entitlement seeps its way into teenage relationships through pressure and manipulation.

If you really love me, you’ll do this.

I really love you, and that’s why I’m doing this for you. To you.

I love you. I didn’t mean to hurt you.

Romance can break your heart figuratively or literally, though when it becomes the latter, it morphs into something other than romance. It becomes violence. Falling in love can be wonderfully thrilling or deceptively dangerous. It’s difficult to believe the person we’re baring our heart and soul to and swapping bodily fluids with could harbor nefarious intentions, especially as a young person, when we’re often less wordly and less jaded, and when emotions are just a lot more intense. Is every kiss a deception? Is every date a brush with danger? A teenager might be more prone to ignoring red flags with a controlling boyfriend simply because they have less experience with recognizing them. They might continue a relationship, hoping the red flags will disappear or improve as the relationship progress. Love can blind us. It can make us ignore the feeling that’s telling us to run. And that is precisely why it makes for a compelling plot device in a young adult thriller. A suspicious love interest might be able to pull the wool over the eyes of even the sleuthiest of main characters, if their heart is invested enough. A recent YA thriller that does this especially well is Alexa Donne’s Edgar-nominated Pretty Dead Queens, and one that subverts the trope in highly bingeable fashion is Megan Lally’s That’s Not My Name. Even Angeline Boulley’s knockout of a debut Firekeeper’s Daughter uses a romantic subplot to cast suspicion on characters not being what they seem, at first glance, which is a theme that continues all the way to the heart stopping conclusion.

I came of age when stranger danger was preached loud and hard. Be wary of strangers, of men in white vans who will lure you with the promise of a puppy or candy. The reality is that the people who are most likely to hurt us are the ones who already have access to us. They can be our family friends. Our teachers. Our boyfriends. They know the ways in which we’re vulnerable; they know our routines; they have our trust, and they can use all of this against us. It’s a bit of a shock, the first time you feel that self-preservation instinct kick in around someone you should be able to trust. I write for teens, and while books are a form of escape and entertainment, they can also act as a mirror. They can be a warning and a safe place to explore dark and disturbing themes and ideas in a way that’s still appropriate (because, spoiler: teens are often dealing with things that adults might find dark or disturbing, but that doesn’t make them any less real).

In my debut YA thriller, The One That Got Away with Murder, romance is not only a subplot but it’s truly at the crux of two cold cases. When my main character Lauren moves to a new town, she’s eager to leave the traumatic end to her last relationship behind her. As much as she tries to downplay it, she’s still in a vulnerable state. The first person she meets is Robbie Crestmont, an enigmatic boy who she begins a no-strings-attached relationship with. She feels a closeness to him, and because they’re intimate, some part of her already trusts him. After all, she trusts him with her body. However, upon learning of her new flame, Lauren’s soccer teammates warn her to stay away from Robbie: he was the last person to see his ex-girlfriend Victoria alive before her body was found floating in a lake. But Lauren can’t reconcile this piece of information with the boy who she is beginning to fall for. Those emotions wield significant power. This leads her to ignore some of her own instincts for self-preservation, even after she finds out Robbie’s brother Trevor was also the last one to see his girlfriend Jess alive. Two brothers, with a dead girlfriend each? What are the chances? Statistically, they’re not low. When Lauren finds disturbing evidence that could prove her teammates were right all along, suddenly her biggest problem goes from trying to survive being the new girl to trying to survive, period.

It is always the boyfriend. It is, at least, in my novel. The question is: which one is it?

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