by The research has been carried out in 12 institutes and 220 interviews and 614 surveys were carried out with Compulsory Secondary Education students.
Four out of ten young Andalusian people consider that their relationship negatively affects their life, according to the study The black box of school failurecoordinated by a research team from the University of Granada in which secondary school students between 12 and 18 years old from the eight Andalusian provinces participated.
The results of this work reveal that the majority of Andalusian adolescents follow a model of romanticized love, which often leads to gender violence (not always identified by the girls) and sexual harassment of the girls.
Almost 34% of adolescents acknowledge having learned something about sex through pornography; three out of ten say they have suffered bullying and 5.2% acknowledge that they share photos of sexual content with their partner.
Furthermore, a model of love in the couple clearly predominates from a romanticization based on jealousy, control and symbolic violence, with strong emotional consequences for the person involved. This model of romanticized love often leads to gender violence (not always identified by girls) and sexual harassment.
The analysis of the trajectories of school success/failure in Compulsory Secondary School from the perspective of adolescent affective-sexual relationships in the current digital Andalusian society (Romance Succ-Ed)”, coordinated by a research team from the University of Granada.
The research has been carried out in 12 institutes in the eight provinces of Andalusia (of which 4 were rural), and 220 interviews and 614 surveys have been carried out with Compulsory Secondary Education (ESO) students between 12 and 18 years old. years.
The general objective of Romance Succ-Ed has been to identify the dimensions that form the “Culture of Romance” in adolescence to understand its impact on the construction of trajectories of school success/failure in Compulsory Secondary School.
The research team is made up of 23 members (16 women and 7 men), belonging to 7 European universities: University of Granada (Granada and Melilla Campus), University of Almería, University of Jaén, University of Valencia, Universidade do Porto ( Portugal), Nottingham Trent University (United Kingdom) and University of Sassari (Italy).
The project (financed by the Department of University, Research and Innovation of the Regional Government of Andalusia and by European FEDER funds) is coordinated by Mar Venegas and José Luis Paniza, from the Department of Sociology of the UGR.
Girls having a partner has more influence on their studies
The results of the research reveal that the boys who consider that having a partner negatively influences their lives point out arguments such as “being late for her because of being angry”, that they “wanted to influence him badly”, or “being distracted due to to fights with them.”
On the contrary, the girls argue “mental disorder” or “stopping studying due to apathy until reaching absenteeism due to the need to see their boyfriend every day.” According to the data obtained in this study, the influence of having a partner on studies is clearly greater in girls, whether positive or negative.
Furthermore, 34.8% of people surveyed who recognize that their relationship negatively affects them consider that it is due to loss of time and concentration. “When you want to talk to your partner, you waste a lot of time; When you are thinking about him/her, you don’t concentrate well,” indicate some of the participants.
Some people talk about how it negatively influences them “because it destabilizes them mentally and reduces the time they dedicate to themselves or their studies.” This “distraction” is greater in girls than in boys, since 64.2% of them confess that they use social networks to maintain contact with their partner. 46.1% admit to using them to exercise control over what the person they like or their partner does.
The work shows that the Culture of Teenage Romance is made up of 8 dimensions: age, love, partner, sexuality, pornography, social networks, cultural references and friendship group. “In our study sample, a romanticized love model clearly predominates, in which the couple is often described as toxic. Sexuality shows an evident lack of consent derived from a rape culture, to which the pornification of sexuality contributes, due to the frequent consumption of mainstream pornography among adolescents,” highlighted Mar Venegas and José Luis Paniza during the presentation of the study. .
This model is produced and reinforced by two dimensions: social networks (whose use is massive, especially through the mobile phone, which appears as a control device over the couple), and the widespread consumption of cultural references such as music, mainly reggaeton. , or television series.
Among the testimonies collected among adolescents participating in this study, pain often appears normalized as inherent to the couple.
“He controlled absolutely everything. Where you go, what you do, send me a photo of who you are with, your WhatsApp conversations, your Instagram conversations, give me your password. (…) We lasted nine months. (…) Well, still, I was, what do I know, I was fine. (…) My mother has been the one who has saved me, to be honest, from that. If not, she would still keep telling me that she is going to hit me,” said one of the participants, 13 years old.
Control and jealousy among adolescents
Control and jealousy build, to a large extent, the way in which adolescent affective-sexual relationships are established. “Based on these data, one might think that the culture of romance in adolescence is closely linked to an ideal model of a traditional, monogamous couple, based on possessiveness and control,” Venegas and Paniza have highlighted.
Furthermore, there is an obvious difference between the 1st cycle of ESO (12-13 years), in which the majority say they have not had sexual experiences; and 2nd cycle (14-15 years), when a minority has already had their first coital relations. 33.4% of people surveyed who claim to have had a partner (or ‘thing’) acknowledge having made love at some time.
Pornography is the main source of sexual information for Andalusian adolescents, according to the study coordinated by the UGR: almost 34% of them acknowledge having learned something about sex through pornography. Furthermore, the majority of participants claim to use social networks for more than five hours a day on average, and 36.5% of course repeaters use social networks for more than 6 hours a day.
Vicarious gender violence (using children to harm the mother) also has a notable incidence among Andalusian adolescents. Social networks seem to have increased the potential control capacity of the members of the couple.
“There is not a single adolescent in the 220 interviews analyzed who identifies this serious problem.” [el control] as another form of expression of gender violence,” Venegas and Paniza have highlighted.
5.2% of the sample acknowledge that they share photos of sexual content with their partner, and 4.1% with their friends. Boys make more sexualized use of networks, since, compared to girls, they use them more to flirt or look for a partner, or to share sexual photos with their partner or their friends.
On the other hand, music is a prominent cultural reference. “Those who listen to music more than three hours a day are 10 percentage points more likely to repeat a grade,” explain Venegas and Paniza. The most listened to style of music is reggaeton, and it has been shown that the time spent on digital leisure is detrimental to performance in studies.”
Lack of selfesteem
Likewise, three out of ten people surveyed acknowledge having suffered bullying, a situation in which a lack of self-esteem emerges in many participants, who even think about suicide.
Being heterosexual reduces the chances of suffering harassment, while being bisexual increases them by 68.8%, and being pansexual, asexual or homosexual, by 36.8%. Practically four out of every ten students who repeat a year indicate that they have suffered harassment in their educational career.
Among the dimensions that make up the culture of romance, the couple negatively affects the school trajectories the most in the case of the girls in the study. The couple obsesses and distracts, but the most prominent cause is gender violence, which only appears in school trajectories marked by grade repetition, but not in those of girls’ academic success.
“I start looking at the book and I don’t read… It’s just that I miss class a lot because I’ve also been in a terrible state of mind because of the boyfriend issue (…) Ugh, it messes everything up for me (…). That person takes a lot from me,” highlights one of the participants, 16 years old, in her testimony.
Girls who suffer from it are not always aware of it. The boy’s control over the girl, the girl’s emotional dependence on the boy, and the discomfort caused by the conflict often appear in the girls’ interviews. “I met a boy who ruined my life so to speak, because he was my first love so to speak. But I don’t know if it was love, if it was obsession or something… emotional instability.” These situations can act as a disincentive to go to school to avoid meeting that person: “I didn’t want to come to class because he was there and I didn’t want to see him,” admits this girl who is only 15 years old.
In light of the results of this research, Mar Venegas and José Luis Paniza conclude that the most basic structure of the forms of emotional-sexual relationship between girls and boys continues to reproduce a structural inequality that is responsible for this high incidence of gender violence. .
Heteronormative masculinity prevails in expressions such as “At night the boys must accompany the girls home so that nothing bad happens to them” or “Girls have greater sensitivity to the feelings of others than boys”, about the that there is a high degree of agreement (52.8% and 38.9% respectively), although 49.5% of participants say they disagree with the statement “Girls with the excuse of equality pretend to have more power.” than the boys.”
Despite the social reproduction of gender inequality, the backdrop has changed severely, due to two major phenomena: the emergence of social networks and the use of mobile phones, but also a generalized attitude of respect towards sexual and physical diversity. and gender, and certain shades of change in the models of love and relationships.
“Gender inequality due to romanticized love based on jealousy and control; toxicity in the couple; rape culture; pornification of culture, and the impact of anti-gender discourses in some adolescents, lead us to conclude with the need to commit to comprehensive affective-sexual education to educate in equality and diversity, in the face of the challenges posed by social networks and dominant cultural references, as is also observed in the results of this study,” conclude Venegas and Paniza.
