Presentation to the World Millennium Conference on Critical Psychology This item is only available from the National Collective of Independent Women's Refuges Inc.

This conference paper discusses popular culture's effect on young girls' notions of romance and the way this opens them up to abuses. This paper draws on a study undertaken by Jackson involving 21 participants. The girls were aged 16 to 18 years, and had previously filled out a survey on abuse in relationships and were willing to be interviewed. The author discusses the ways in which the girls in the study romanticise and downplay acts of abuse perpetrated on them by ex-boyfriends, pointing out they are laced with contradictions of identifying the behaviour and then softening it. This, she argues, is part of the fairytale illusion that girls do not want to lose, even after the relationship has turned bad and ended.

nz