When Love Hurts: How Screening and  Early Intervention by Mobile Health  Programs Can Address the  Behavioral Health Impact of Teen Dating Violence

Many people happily share memories of their first kiss or meeting their high school sweetheart. These memories, often occurring during teenage years, are typically seen as innocent and harmless. For some teens, what looks like young love can be a nightmare that leaves invisible bruises and lasting scars.

Teen dating violence, nationally recognized every February, is a serious public health issue. Data show that one in three U.S. teens experience physical, emotional, or sexual abuse from a dating partner before they reach adulthood. When not addressed, teen dating violence can contribute to academic challenges, depression, isolation, anxiety, substance use, and increased risk of suicidal thoughts and attempts.

Challenges with Addressing Hidden Pain

One of the main challenges in addressing teen dating violence is that it is often hidden. Teens may not tell anyone they are being abused due to fear, shame, loyalty to their partner, or concerns about not being believed. Like adults, teens may even struggle to recognize their experience as abuse when they believe their partner loves them or if the abusive behavior is normalized.

When teens are ready to report the abuse to an adult, the abuse is often documented, and they may receive a referral. While referrals are important, they are not enough to ensure the teens are connected to care when and where they need it. Challenges with long waiting times, transportation barriers, lack of youth-friendly programs, and fragmented systems mean that many teens never receive the timely, trauma-informed care they need. As a result, the behavioral health (mental health and substance use) impacts of teen dating violence continue to escalate.

Collaboration is Essential to Reducing the Behavioral Health Impact

So, whose responsibility is it to address teen dating violence? The correct answer is clear; it is everyone’s responsibility. Prevention, identification, and treatment require coordinated, cross-sector collaboration among schools, healthcare providers, community leaders, and families. This includes educating adults and teens on what teen dating violence looks like, conducting routine trauma-informed care screenings, ensuring staff are properly trained to deliver developmentally appropriate care, and creating programs where teens feel safe to share their experience. Together, these efforts help identify concerns sooner, intervene earlier, and access high-quality care quicker, reducing the long-term behavioral health impact.

How Mobile Health Programs Can Help

Mobile clinics play a critical role in reducing barriers, strengthening trust, and bridging persistent gaps in access to prevention, early intervention and treatment services. By bringing services directly into schools, neighborhoods, and community settings, mobile programs significantly reduce barriers that prevent teens from getting help when and where they need it.

Mobile healthcare programs can:

• Establish Partnerships: Work with schools, faith-based organizations, health departments, and community groups to host workshops on healthy relationships. Education reduces stigma and shame associated with being abused. It also signals to teens that your mobile program is a safe place to bring concerns about dating violence.
• Provide Staff Training: Ensure mobile staff are trained to conduct on-site trauma-informed screening for teen dating violence, depression, anxiety, substance use, and assess risk for suicide. They can also help parents and caregivers recognize warning signs and learn how to have difficult conversations with their teens.
• Reduce Barriers: Deliver care where teens live, work, and learn which reduce transportation and scheduling barriers.

Using mobile healthcare programs to meet teens where they are, both physically and mentally, and creating a safe space for open discussion about abuse, creates pathways to care before a crisis occurs and before behavioral health conditions are exacerbated.

Call to Action

Teen dating violence is not just a relationship issue; it is a public behavioral health issue with lasting consequences. Addressing this important issue requires strategy, coordination, and moving beyond referrals with little follow-up. Mobile healthcare programs offer a practical, scalable way to strengthen screening, intervention, and engagement for teens who might otherwise remain hidden.

If we are serious about improving teens’ mental health, local governments, school systems, and healthcare organizations must invest in solutions that meet teens where they are before their invisible bruises become lasting scars.

By Patsy Cunningham, MA, LCPC,
Senior Program Director, Behavioral Health
Mission Mobile Medical