Vicki Crompton - Saving Beauty from the Beast: How to Protect Your Daughter from an Unhealthy Relationship

AUTHORS NOTE: Featured in this book are true stories ofindividuals, notcomposites. Many ofthe persons interviewed have kindly permitted us touse their real names. Others have requested that we change their names. Wehave indicated aliases with asterisks. (First names beneath the italicizedquotes throughout the book have also been changed to protect privacy.) We thank all the interviewees for sharing their stories.

Copyright 2003 by Vicki Crompton and Ellen Zelda Kessner

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

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ISBN: 978-0-316-03004-5

Book design by Oksana Kushnir

This book is dedicated to the

memory of our beloved daughters,

Jennifer Crompton

and

Sheryl Kessner-Shalom,

and

to the memory

of all the young women

who did not survive their

boyfriends love

We are most grateful to the young people and to the moms and dads who agreed to tell their stories for this book. They generously gave us hours of their time and courageously relived their experiences, sharing with us in great depth their anguish, fears, frustrations, and eventual triumphs. We would like to name them all, but some, wishing to protect their privacy, have asked us to disguise their identities. And so, we broadcast our appreciation to those who have allowed us to use their real names:

We would also like to give our sincere thanks to the mom-and-daughter team of Lorre and Nikki Taylor and the dad-and-daughter team of Brien and Zeina Kinkel, who so articulately described the ways in which they communicate the possibility of abuse before the situation can develop.

Without the insights and practical advice of experts in many fields psychologists, school principals and counselors, family therapists, law enforcement officers, and threat-assessment professionals this book would not have been possible. For their unending patience in answering every new question that came up and for sending us a wealth of helpful materials, we are especially grateful to

We give special thanks to our agent, Rita Rosenkranz, for her belief in us, for nurturing our project from the beginning, for her brilliant editorial suggestions during the proposal stage, and for continuing to give us her skilled advice and unfailing moral support throughout the journey.

We wish to thank Deborah Baker, our editor, for her encouragement and for her commitment to bringing the issue of dating violence to the attention of parents of teenagers and preteens. We appreciate her insightful editing; it was Deborah who, in many stories throughout the book, detected and articulated the recurring theme of Beauty trying to save the Beast with her love. We also send our thanks to her always gracious and helpful assistant, Allison Powell, and to the other members of the Little, Brown and Company staff involved in this project.

Vicki Crompton

I thank Bonnie Campbell, director of the Violence Against Women Office under the Clinton administration. Bonnie reached out to me with compassion and understanding when my grief was raw. Most important, she listened to crime victims nationwide, turning our words into action.

Im grateful to my coauthor, Ellen Zelda Kessner, for writing the first national magazine piece about dating violence, with Jennys story as the main focus, and for her continued dedication to the issue. I cherish the friendship we have developed and the shared experiences we have had as two mothers who lost daughters.

Finally, I want to recognize the love and support of my family: my parents, Joan and Mac McAdams; my children, Kate Crompton and Steven Tetter; and my husband, Greg Tetter. They are the people who sacrificed their time with me over the years as I traveled to one high school after another, who supported my wish to return to school for my masters degree so that I could more effectively counsel crime victims, and who took a backseat to my many victim advocacy activities. Most especially, I send my love and thanks to Greg. From the moment he found Jenny dying on the floor, he has devoted himself to protecting me and supporting my efforts to survive the tragedy. He willingly picked up the pieces and ran the household when I was unable to; he stayed behind and parented the children when I was speaking. He is content to be the wind beneath my wings. He is my hero.

Ellen Zelda Kessner

I want to thank my coauthor, Vicki Crompton, for her constant inspiration and friendship. Vicki and I became linked by a confluence of events. After writing the story of my twenty-eight-year-old daughter Sheryls murder for Womans Day, I was assigned by Red-book to write an article about teenage girls who were murdered by their boyfriends. As both bereaved mother and writer, I attended a national conference of Parents of Murdered Children, where I met Vicki in deep mourning for her daughter Jenny, whose sixteenth birthday celebration would never be. During our long telephone conversations, we became a mini support group, emotionally drawn into each others life, and I found myself sharing Vickis mission to educate the public about teen dating violence. It has been an enriching experience.

I want to give thanks to my family my daughter Deborah In-dursky and her husband, Jerry, and my son, Neil Kessner, and his wife, Sandi, for their encouragement. Special kudos go to my husband, Fred, for all his love and support throughout the years, for keeping me supplied with reams of paper and ink cartridges, for driving me to mid-Manhattan in rush-hour traffic to arrange interviews for this book, and for giving up our weekends together when I was in lockdown at my computer, meeting deadlines. And our grandson David gets special mention for keeping his gramps company at restaurants and movies during those weekends. I am also grateful for the encouragement of our other grandchildren Sam, SarahBeth, Alyson, Leah, and Evan who I hope will someday use the information in this book to develop healthy relationships of their own.

JENNYS STORY

TIME RUSHES HEADLONG, and our daughters are on the cusp of their teen years or already there, thinking of boys, perhaps beginning to date. We try to prepare them for the problems they will encounter in a complex world. But the tempo has quickened and intensified since the decades when we were in our teens. We discuss premature sex and its perils, disease and pregnancy, ways to say no to drugs and drinking, the risks of eating disorders and of dangerous drivers. But what about the overlooked, understated danger, which most of us have never experienced in our own dating days dating abuse?