Finnish boys aged 15 to 16 are more likely to experience violence from their dating partners than girls of the same age. The matter comes out in a study by the National Research Institute on Legal Policy.
An extensive survey on youth crime shows that 22 per cent of boys in a dating relationship had been hit at least once by their girlfriends. Only six per cent of girls had experienced similar events.
The most serious types of violence is striking someone with a fist or a hard object, or kicking. Nine per cent of boys and two per cent of girls had experienced such attacks.
Being grabbed, or prevented from moving was the only type of violence that birls experienced more often than boys. The figures were 19 per cent and 14 per cent respectively.
The results were not very surprising, and followed the lines of a survey conducted in 2004, says Venla Salmi, who conducted the present study.
She says that one likely reason for the treater amount of dating violence perpetrated by girls is attributable to attitudes. The threshold for girls to commit violent acts may be lower than for boys because violence perpetrated by girls is not taken as seriously as that committed by boys.
The study also finds that Finnish teenagers tend to be victims of violence from a dating partner more frequently than adult women do.
There is no data available on violence in dating relationships experienced by adult men.
Most of the violence experienced by young people in Finland takes place outside couple relationships, with 29 per cent of the young people who are dating saying that they had been attacked by someone.
The material for the study was compiled last year, with more than 5,800 young people aged 15 and 16 responding.
Questionnaires are seen to be more reliable measures of the frequency of violence than crime statistics, because only a small proportion of violence is ever reported to the police.
