(A guest blog for the 16 Days of Action Against Domestic Abuse, by an EdShift Trustee Kate Adamson)
As part of the 16 Days of Action Against Domestic Abuse campaign, I’m honoured to contribute this piece as a guest writer and Trustee for EdShift.
This blog explores what it was like growing up as a teenage girl in the 90s and 00s, and how the subtle and often harmful messages we absorbed about relationships shaped our expectations of love, boundaries, and gender roles. By revisiting these experiences, I hope to highlight how early miseducation can lead to unhealthy relationships or domestic abuse in adulthood, and why effective healthy relationship education is essential for prevention. As I’ll show, many of us grew up learning about love through guesswork, pop culture, and peer pressure, not guidance. By unpacking these early influences, we can understand how they shaped our choices.
Healthy relationship education can give young people the language, confidence, and tools we never had, so they can build better relationships rooted in respect and genuine connection.
Media Influence in the 90s and 00s: How Pop Culture Taught Us the Wrong Lessons
Before social media, much of our cultural education came from magazines, TV, and film. Heat magazine taught us that women’s bodies were public property. We picked apart women’s bodies for fun. Who remembers the scary red circles drawn around a celebrity’s leg because she dared to have a freckle? TV shows like Friends made jealousy and sarcasm look romantic and harmless. Rom-coms like Love Actually normalised power imbalances, obsession masquerading as devotion, and fat-shaming disguised as humour. These films and TV shows were more than just entertainment. We absorbed them as relationship handbooks, guides to relationships that shaped a generation. And, at the time, we didn’t have a clue because adults were laughing along.
In the 90s and early 00s, relationship expectations formed long before we had access to today’s conversations about consent, boundaries, or emotional wellbeing. Instead, our understanding of “love” was shaped by pop culture.
Heat Magazine and Body Shame
Magazines like Heat normalised body shaming, celebrity scrutiny, and constant comparison. Girls were taught that desirability equalled worth. Heat magazine felt like a bible of how to learn what men want and that was the most important thing in the world. What I personally learned was that if you were not physically perfect then you will be humiliated and no man will want you. I still blame Heat magazine for why I feel anxious even now about wearing a tank top in summer.
Problematic TV Shows: A Look at Friends
Sitcoms like Friends embedded the idea that jealousy was romantic, emotional immaturity was comedy, and disrespect in relationships was just “banter.” These unhealthy relationship dynamics became normalised through repetition. During Covid, I decided to revisit Friends and watched the entire series. I was quite shocked at some of the episodes and couldn’t believe that this show was considered one of the stand-out guides for relationships for millennials. Ross was a bit much wasn’t he?
Rom-Coms Like Love Actually
Films such as Love Actually framed power imbalances, pursuit bordering on harassment, and objectification as romantic storylines. These narratives affected the way many young people interpreted love and attraction. This film has rightly been much criticised now. The Andrew Lincoln character seemed ever so romantic. But he’s probably every woman’s worst nightmare in reality. He stalks his best mate’s wife and then is rewarded for it with a kiss.
What Girls Learned: Harmful Relationship Lessons We Didn’t Notice at the Time
As girls growing up in the 90s and 00s, we picked up messages that shaped our teenage years and often our adulthood:
- Be accommodating at all costs
- Jealousy means passion
- Love should be dramatic
- Boundaries make you “difficult”
- Someone else’s desire determines your value
And the damaging classic:
“If he’s mean to you, it means he likes you.”
A sentence that taught a generation of girls to minimise disrespect and misinterpret cruelty as affection. I’ve lost count how many times teachers and family members said this phrase to me. It didn’t feel right even then.
What Boys Learned: Toxic Masculinity and Emotional Repression
Boys growing up in the same era also absorbed messages that were just as harmful:
- Vulnerability is weakness
- Dominance equals desirability
- Feelings are embarrassing
- “Persistence” is romantic
- Objectification is normal
- Emotional literacy isn’t masculine
Many boys weren’t taught healthy communication or emotional regulation. Instead, they saw male characters win affection through jealousy, mockery, or entitlement. This miseducation often led to harmful behaviours and not always out of malice, but from imitation and pressure. This doesn’t excuse it, but it helps explain how unhealthy relationship patterns formed on both sides.
A “Grown-Up” Relationship That Wasn’t: What We Saw at School
At my school in the North West of England there was a memorable teenage couple in my year. It was an abusive relationship, no question about it. The boy regularly shouted at the girl, insulted her, and pushed her against the wall. We even saw him hold her up by her throat one time. Often it was because he had seen her talking to another boy in her class. Bizarrely, they became our blueprint for romance. We sensed it was wrong, it definitely made you uncomfortable witnessing it. But strangely, many of us saw it as something to aspire to. We saw it as intense, passionate, and like a proper ‘grown-up’ relationship. No teacher ever intervened. I remember teachers walking past them both and not saying a word. The teachers seemed annoyed if the girl was late to class even when she was clearly in distress and they knew what she was going through. This response from adults confirmed to us all at the time that this behaviour was not a big deal. It became one of many early examples that I can think of how domestic abuse can begin with “normalising” problematic teen behaviours.
The Boys on My Street: When Abuse Was Normalised
When I was really little, even before my teens I encountered bullying from the boys who lived on my street. Not just one boy, but several. One of them was 17 years old and shot me with an air rifle when I was 7 years old and just out riding my bike. Another boy when I was 10, bullied, intimidated, and physically harmed me and my friends. He was about 15. Him and his even older brother shoved us, spat on us, and called us sexualised names we didn’t even understand yet.
My parents were obviously very angry. But the boys’ parents didn’t seem to see anything wrong in their behaviour. It caused a big rift in the street and arguments often occurred. It made me retreat and decide not to report it anymore because I felt like I was causing trouble. The boys’ mums would brush it off as “boys being boys” and that I needed to “toughen up”. So I just tried my best to avoid them and not to cause a fuss. I often wonder what those boys are up to now and what their partners may be enduring. This taught me and my friends that girls’ safety was negotiable and boys’ aggression was excusable and to be expected.
The Influence of Our Parents’ Generation: A Lack of Healthy Relationship Models
Many children who grew up in the 90s and 00s were raised by parents born in the 60s – a generation that sometimes lacked emotional literacy and grew up with traditional gender expectations. They did their best, but their own relationship models were shaped by:
- Rigid gender roles
- Their own parents dealing with trauma from the second World War
- Limited conversations about feelings or mental health
- High-conflict or emotionally distant households
- A cultural expectation to “stay together no matter what”
- Very little education around consent, boundaries, or communication
These early family dynamics became our blueprint. They shaped what we believed love looked like long before we entered our own relationships.
Why This Matters: How Miseducation Creates Risk for Domestic Abuse
The reason I write about all this is because these early messages matter. They matter because many victims of domestic abuse learned early to tolerate disrespect. They matter because many perpetrators learned that jealousy, control, or dominance was normal. They matter because schools rarely taught us otherwise and society reinforced these ideas everywhere we looked.
If we want to prevent domestic abuse, we must start by understanding the culture that shaped us and changing what shapes young people today.
Support and Resources for Healthy Relationships and Domestic Abuse
Here are trusted organisations offering information, education, and support:
- GOV.UK Domestic Abuse Guidance
https://www.gov.uk/guidance/domestic-violence-and-abuse - Women’s Aid – Support & Resources
https://womensaid.org.uk/information-support/downloads-and-resources/ - Expect Respect (Women’s Aid)
https://www.womensaid.org.uk/information-support/children-and-young-people/expect-respect/ - EdShift – Our work with young survivors and prevention programmes
https://edshift.co.uk/ - Domestic Abuse Volunteer Support Services (DAVSS)
https://www.davss.org.uk/youth-empowerment/ - Neighbourhood Watch Domestic Abuse Toolkit
https://www.ourwatch.org.uk/crime-prevention/crime-types/domestic-abuse/domestic-abuse-campaign-toolkit
Final Thoughts: Why Healthy Relationship Education Saves Lives
This blog is more than a reflection, it’s a reminder. When relationship myths go unchallenged, they grow into harmful behaviours. When young people don’t learn about boundaries, respect, and emotional wellbeing, cycles of domestic abuse continue. If we can improve healthy relationship education, we can break these cycles. And by sharing these stories during the 16 Days of Action Against Domestic Abuse, we can shine a light on how deeply early miseducation influences adult relationships and how much better we can make the future.
