A survivor is sharing her story to help others
- Jessica Sanchez
- May 23, 2022
- 2 min read
Updated: May 26, 2022
Erika Port knows teen dating violence all too well. It happened to her when she was just 14 years old.
"It was entering high school in a brand new setting. I became a freshman, the bottom of the totem pole so to speak, and a senior started paying attention to me and that felt really good," Port recalled. "He showered me with compliments, made me feel good."
But those compliments quickly turned into something else.
"It was basically telling me he loved me more than anyone else was ever going to love me.
He would make up lies of things my friends would say so I would like get mad at them and destroy our friendships," she said.
She said he abused her mentally, physically and sexually.
"There was a breaking point and I just remember, like, praying very hard, like, help me leave this relationship," she said.
After a year and a half, she escaped the abusive relationship. But even after, Port said her abuser stalked her well into her early 20s. She said he was never caught or punished for his abuse. Now, years later though, Port dedicates her time to making sure this doesn't happen to other teens.
"I've had a lot of therapy. I'm actually back in school studying public health and social work and I'm really, really passionate about doing prevention work," she said. "I think parents really need to make sure that they have open lines of communications. Teens, especially, don't want talk in front of their friends with their parents so if a parent and a teen want to talk it probably should be in a setting where you can be alone with your teen and talk."
Port said that if she could go back to her younger self and give a message to her, it would be this: “I really think I would tell my 14-year-old self you deserve better, you don't deserve to be hurt, and that includes any sort of physical violence, sexual violence, emotional violence. You deserve to be built up, not be brought down.”
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