LAS VEGAS -- During court-mandated private therapy sessions, teenage victims of domestic violence sit across from social worker Lora Watkins with cell phones in their hands -- still sending dozens of text messages to their abusers.
It's maddening, but Watkins, a domestic-violence therapist for nearly a decade, is accustomed to having an unwelcome third participant in the room: the cell phone.
This is a new dimension of domestic abuse and stalking, where an abuser's reach extends as far as cell-phone towers and the Internet will allow.
Text-message harassment, online attacks through Facebook and e-mail monitoring by a jealous partner can escalate into a sort of electronic assault that's hard to avoid because cell-phone use is so common. It's also hard for many to understand: Sticks and stones will break my bones, the thinking goes, but text messages will never hurt me.
If the text messages become threatening, Watkins recommends that victims transcribe the messages onto paper and have the document notarized to be used as evidence or as justification for a restraining order.
The nonprofit Family Violence Prevention Fund has a name for the new cruelty: "digital dating abuse." It's also been dubbed "textual harassment."
On Friday, a Nevada Senate committee heard Assembly Bill 309, which would add "text messaging" to Nevada's definition of stalking, making stalking with text messages a felony. If the bill becomes law -- it passed unanimously in the Assembly last month -- Nevada will become one of the few states with anti-stalking laws that specifically include text messaging. Others, as of March, were Tennessee, Texas, Utah and Washington.
One in three teens reported receiving 10 to 30 text messages an hour from a partner keeping tabs on them, a 2007 study said.
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