When Jeff Cheeseborough goes into schools to speak, he hears about violence in teen relationships.

"I hear the whole gamut, from gang rape to just the casual - not so casual -physical harassment in the hallways," he said.

Cheeseborough serves as chaplain at Kootenai County Juvenile Detention. He speaks frequently in schools and is director of the nonprofit Juvenile Justice Outreach.

Violence among teens is a problem, he said.

According to a 2011 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention survey, 9.4 percent of students in high school reported being the target of physical violence from a boyfriend or girlfriend. A 2010 survey showed that one in five women and one in seven men were 11-17 years old when they first experienced some sort of violence from a partner.

Futures Without Violence, formerly the Family Violence Prevention Fund, estimates that one in three teen girls has experienced abuse in some form from a dating partner - whether physical, emotional or verbal.

Cheeseborough was careful to say that not all, or even most, youth exhibit unhealthy behaviors, but all of them know somebody who has been harassed, bullied, or experienced some kind of dating violence or sexual assault.

He believes teen relationship violence is a reflection of our culture.

"Women are objectified through pornography on the Internet, through the examples in relationships that the kids see at home, and just in the culture of their peers," he said.

In addition, in high school boys and girls are struggling to understand what it means to be men and women, and how to relate to each other in a healthy way, Cheeseborough said.

"It is important to have conversations about these topics, about these issues, as much as possible to help them with perspective on sexuality," he said.

Parents need to be involved, and to open up conversations about what is safe, what is healthy, and what is not. This can even mean bringing in a third party if necessary to help communicate or advocate for healthy relationships, said Joe Robinson, North Idaho Violence Prevention Center executive director.

Like Cheeseborough, Robinson also believes culture can play a destructive role in both adult and teen relationship violence.

Our culture rewards men for being aggressive, and it rewards ladies' men. "Those two concepts collide at some point," he said. One way to shift attitudes is to empower young men to become "positive bystanders."

When a young man is with his friends and those friends talk about women in a negative way, as a positive bystander he can say "I don't accept that, I don't want to hear that, and you're out of line," Robinson said.

About this series:

- October is National Domestic Violence Awareness Month. This is the last of a four-part series about domestic violence in North Idaho.