I am not an avid TV watcher, but I keep up to date with what’s going on in pop culture through the status updates on my Facebook news feed. After MTV aired the episode of Jersey Shore where Snooki, one of the guidettes,  gets punched by a guy at the bar, I read Facebook statuses of friends like “damn that bitch got smacked” and “that’s so crazy, pumped for next week’s episode”. I was interested in how MTV would deal with the violence, so I sat at home and caught a re-run of that episode. After the show, MTV stated they did not condone violence and if you are in a situation where you are being abused, please contact a hotline and seek help. It felt like they were clearing their name, airing a 60-second PSA on dating violence, after glorifying violence against women. I doubt the millions of viewers who drank in Jersey Shore sat around afterward discussing gender violence, or how fucked up it was on MTV’s part to promote the episode using that clip. Most people were excited to catch next week’s episode and hoped it was as juicy.

February is Teen Dating Violence Awareness Month, and I’ve been watching an influx of shows, PSAs and segments created by the mainstream media in order to combat this “rising epidemic” of teen dating violence and “sexting”. MTV has launched their own campaign against ‘digital drama’ and ‘sexting’, A Thin Line, with a website full of expensive-looking videos, quizzes and stories targeted towards teens. As a young womyn of color and a product of this generation, I couldn’t help but notice how much money MTV executives were spending to create a website for teens with hired teen actors and a $10k challenge. Is this what MTV is presenting to my peer group? A handful of badly-written scripts, supposedly “for us” with some edgy graphics?

Katie Couric’s featured video was on teen dating violence, and was basically “A Thin Line” for mothers. The video did offer heartfelt stories, alarming statistics and voices of real victims of violence, but what I got out of the thirty-minute segment is terror that clueless mothers across America are jotting down mental notes listening to Couric & Co.’s advice. Couric suggests that parents should ban their child from using his/her phone at night and keep the computers outside the bedrooms. If my mother banned me from my phone after 9 p.m. to keep me safe from violence, I would have told her to stop paying attention to novelas! Follow Couric’s advice if you want your daughter/son hating you; adolescence is hectic as it is, no need for more tension in the household.

As a young feminist-activista growing up in Bushwick, I was aware of violence; I would hear couples arguing in the streets at night, witnessed husbands raising their hands at wives, and know girls who think when a guy gets crazy jealous its because he loves her. Going to high school in the Lower East Side, I became more involved with the activist scene and declared myself a feminist. After the murder of a seventeen year-old Tina Negron at a local supermarket by her boyfriend, a neighborhood coalition formed called The Power of Peace. POP wants to put an end to violence and promote peace through organizing marches, events and community projects. Through empowering young people to make change, we can create environments and give them the knowledge to make smarter decisions. I doubt my friends have seen the Couric special or heard of “A Thin Line”, and they probably wouldn’t show much interest in it, since we’re not represented. Corporate media, we’re smarter than you think we are, so give us respect and show an interest in what we actually have to say!