Lesson 3: Role of the Pediatrician

In this next short video, we're gonna be talking a little bit about how prevalent a RA is and also how it is, um, a public health epidemic and sort of the health outcomes that are associated with experiencing a RA. So, a RA is unfortunately, incredibly common. The statistic that's cited most frequently is one in three adolescents have experienced a RA.

So, and just a couple more statistics to dive into. In 2016, study of adolescents who were between 12 to 18 showed that 69% of them had experienced a RA sometime in their life. And this was of those who had started dating, 69% of them had experienced a RA sometime in their life. Um, other studies have shown that one in 11 females and one in 14 males report physical a RA in the past year, one in eight females and one in, and one in 26 males report sexual a RA in the past year.

25 to 41% of teens report digital a RA. Um, and 20% of adolescent females report reproductive coercion, which is, um, when a partner, um, tries to control someone's reproductive health injustice. And so, um, very, very, very common, very prevalent among adolescents. Um, and what I think is important for us to know as pediatricians is that around a quarter of female and 15% of male survivors of adult partner violence said that they had first experienced partner violence before the age of 18. So I think we have a huge opportunity here to prevent future violence, and also critical for us to remember is that 7% of adolescent homicides were perpetrated by an intimate partners. So, um, really critical, I think also to support families in promoting healthy relationships.

And so ARA is a public health epidemic. It is associated with multiple health outcomes. This is really critical because as pediatric healthcare clinicians, obviously we care so much about this, right? Like we wanna improve. The

health and thriving of, um, adolescents and young people. And so, um, there has been work that has shown that adolescents who experience ARA have higher rates of depression, anxiety, eating disorders, suicidality, substance use, sexually transmitted infections, unintended pregnancy, and like I said before, experiencing violence in adult relationships.

This is really a public health. [00:10:00] Crisis. This is a public health epidemic, and it's something that we as pediatric healthcare clinicians are really well suited to support and to, um, to work on. And I do think it's important to not view a RA in the silo, um, because a RA victimization and perpetration can co-occur with other forms of violence, including exposure to IPV.

Bullying, child abuse and neglect community violence. And so a lot of the skills around prevent promoting healthier relationships that you'll be teaching or sharing with patients will also help prevent other types of violence as well. So what can we do? So we know that adolescent relationship abuse is common associated with negative sign, significant lifelong, um, health outcomes.

And but really what's very interesting is that a recent study showed that only 11% of adolescents ages 11 to 14 and 24% of those 15 to 18 were asked about safe relationships during well-child visits. So I think there's a lot of opportunity for us as pediatricians to support families in this way. And, you know, we also found a systematic review of primary care based sexual health and re sexual and reproductive health interventions showed only two focused on healthy relationships and one on a RA.

So we really saw, um, a need for evidence-based resources for the pediatric healthcare clinician. On promoting healthy relationships and a RA prevention, which is where engaging together for healthy relationships comes in.