Teen Dating Violence: lo psicologo scolastico alla frontiera tra prevenzione e interventi di presa in carico territoriale ed interistituzionale

The World Health Organization (2016) has defined intimate partner violence as a public health problem, that becomes more pressing as younger the perpetrators and victims are, since adolescence is a crucial time for building personal identity (Lancini et al., 2020) and for organizing future relational models. As is well known, during adolescence, the process of identification and emancipation from the family is consolidated primarily within the peer group, the primary place where adolescents develop their relational skills and establish their first emotional relationships. And it is precisely within these relationships, both within peer groups or couples, that they can experience, directly or through their own experiences, episodes of gender-based violence (Beltramini, 2020). According to the latest Save the Children report, 17% of girls and boys in Italy between the ages of 14 and 18 years believe that a slap is possible in an intimate relationship. Moving from opinions to experiences, almost one in five adolescents (19%), who are or have been in an intimate relationship, report having been frightened by their partner with violent behavior, such as slapping, punching, pushing, or throwing objects. One of the privileged contexts for intercepting the phenomenon of gender-based violence among adolescents is school, where the school psychologist can play a central role, not only as a link between the school and other local agencies that address situations of violence, but also as a promoter of projects to prevent violence and promote well-being in peer relationships, more effective they are more integrated and adopted from the Inter-institutional Territorial Anti-Violence Network.